Re: Parsing timestamps?

On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 7:55:43 +0000, Paul Rubin wrote:

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

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 -

>
Hardware floating point also had single and double precision.  The
really awful 1960s systems were gone by the mid 70s.  But there were a
lot of competing formats, ranging from bad to mostly-ok.  VAX floating
point was mostly ok, DEC wanted IEEE to adopt it, Kahan was ok with
that, but Intel thought "go for the best possible".  Kahan's
retrospectives on this stuff are good reading:

What is there not to like with the FPU? It provides 80 bits, which
is in itself a useful additional format, and should never have problems
with single and double-precision edge cases. Plus it does all the
trigonometric and transcendental stuff with a reasonable precision
out-of-box. The instruction set is very regular and quite Forth-like.
The only problem is that some languages and companies find it necessary
to boycott FPU use.
-marcel
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