From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2008-12-06T06:12:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20393] Re: Leave my open classes alone (was   Behavior: autoload calls	rb_require()  directly)

On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 04:46:36AM +0900, Brent Roman wrote:
> 
> Paul,
> 
> As we all know, Ruby
> Integers are 32-bits or 64-bits wide, but Fixnums are somewhat smaller.
> They get transparently promoted by Bignums as needed.
> Similarly, a 64-bit VM could define SmallFloats.  These would be a floats
> few bits
> short of 64-bits that are promoted to a full Floats as needed.

You can't easily do these sorts of tricks with floating point numbers;
it breaks IEEE floating point compatibility.  On some platforms you
might be able to get away with breaking out the exponent and dropping a
few bits off it, but you'd want a LOT of unit tests to ensure you don't
introduce a subtle incompatibility.

Floating point code can be very fragile, and I'd feel much better about
a solution that leaves the floating point number intact.

Paul