Re: Parsing timestamps?

Am 10.07.2025 um 10:50 schrieb Stephen Pelc:

On 10 Jul 2025 at 02:18:50 CEST, "minforth" <minforth@gmx.net> wrote:
 

"Industry" can manage well with 32-bit
floats or even smaller with non-standard number formats.

 My customers beg to differ and some use 128 bit numbers for
their work. In a construction estimate for one runway for the
new Hong Kong airport, the cost difference between a 64 bit FP
calculation and the integer calculation was US 10 million dollars.
This was for pile capping which involves a large quantity of relatively
small differences.

You are right. "Industry" is one of those non-words that should be
used with care, or avoided altogether, before it becomes a tautology.
IIRC I only had one real application for 128-bit floats: simulation
of heat propagation through thick-walled tubes. The simulation
involved numerical integration which can be prone to error accumulation.
One variant of MinForth's fp-number wordset can be built with gcc's
libquadmath library. It is slower, but speed is not always important.