From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2012-01-30T20:26:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Microrant on Ruy's Math Skills

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Tony Arcieri <tony.arcieri@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Floating points are a great choice for approximating continuous values and
> thus working on things which require both high performance and
> approximating real-world data sources. This includes things like games,
> non-gaming related 3D applications, perceptual media including audio and
> video codecs, and everything involved in working with perceptual media on
> computers such as non-linear editing, speech synthesis, and speech
> recognition.

That's right, lots of use cases.  And I bet that in these use cases
the programmer never even wants to test two floats for equality.
Representation problems or not, the probability that two points on a
continuum coincide is vanishingly small.  So seeking a way to impose
such a test on the floating point type is inappropriate, as many have
said.

Gavin