sizes of floats, was: +-Inf and NaN

[Robert Dodier]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 7:40 AM Camm Maguire <camm@maguirefamily.org> wrote:

> Does anyone care about anything other than 4 or 8 byte floats?

I know I don't, also I've never encountered, in 40+ years of numerical
programming, a problem that really needed bigger or smaller ones. I'm
not claiming those problems don't exist; only that they're uncommon to
the point of invisibility.

Creating another float type is taking on a pretty big investment in
implementation and testing. (The first person who says "OH IT'S NO BIG
DEAL" is hereby saddled with the responsibility for it.) Frankly I
don't think the investment is worth the very small expected payoff.

FWIW

Robert