Re: Parsing timestamps?

On 11/07/2025 1:17 pm, Paul Rubin wrote:

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

When someone begins with the line it rarely ends well:
"Twenty years ago anarchy threatened floating-point arithmetic."
One floating-point to rule them all.

 
This gives a good perspective on posits:
 
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/ma221_Fall20/Dinechin_etal_2019.pdf
 
Floating point arithmetic in the 1960s (before my time) was really in a
terrible state.  Kahan has written about it.  Apparently IBM 360
floating point arithmetic had to be redesigned after the fact, because
the original version had such weird anomalies.

But was it the case by the mid/late 70's - or certain individuals saw an
opportunity to influence the burgeoning microprocessor market?  Notions of
single and double precision already existed in software floating point -
most notably in the Microsoft binary format.  We're talking apps such as
Microsoft's Fortran for CP/M.  Back then MS was very serious about quashing
any issues customers found.