From: "Matthias Wächter" <matthias@...>
Date: 2012-01-25T16:57:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Microrant on Ruy's Math Skills

On 23.01.2012 11:33, Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> Feature request:
>
> Based on this discussion, it would actually be useful to me if I could
> shorten this:
>
>    amount = BigDecimal.new("15.5")
>
> to
>
>    amount = 15.5B
>
> Then we could also answer future questions about
>
> "How come  1.1 - 1.0 != 0.1 ??"
>
> with
>
> "1.1B - 1B == 0.1B"

I’m curious to see what’s gonna happen once Desktop CPUs start to 
support the nice decimal floating-point types of IEEE 754-2008 
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008#Basic_formats] … maybe Ruby 
should already prepare syntactically for support of these types. And, in 
theory, there is already a library from Intel 
[http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-decimal-floating-point-math-library/] 
one can use to do decimal floating-point math.

– Matthias