Re: FAA To Finally Ditch Floppy Disks & Win-95

On 6/23/25 9:36 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:43:35 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
 

Many of the world's ills are caused by people using floating point when
they really shouldn't.  "Oh, there's a decimal in dollar amounts;
that means we _must_ use floating point."  They obviously never heard of
decimal pennies (or suitable fractions of pennies).

 Remember that, in the current IEEE 754 spec, floating-point can be decimal
or binary.
 Very few languages include fixed-point types (with a fractional part) as
standard -- Ada being an exception, as I recall.

   Ada does.
   However you're very right, very FEW langs these days
   include fixed-point as standard, or at all. Maybe
   it's just because most everything now has float support,
   or maybe everyone has FORGOTTEN why fixed was useful.
   Maybe I need to brush up on my COBOL .........