

DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford - tosh
http://dec64.org/

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wglb
Posted not that long ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812)
with substantial commentary and criticism.

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tosh
Thanks wglb, seems like the domain changed (even though the .com still works
and does not redirect)

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lowbloodsugar
>By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to
waste their time making choices that don’t matter. Even worse, making a bad
choice can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs.

So why not use BigDecimal? It's too slow? So performance _is_ a reasonable
selection criterion? But not performance of million ints vs a million DEC64s?
o_0

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shaurz
IEEE 754-2008 already has standardised decimal formats:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754-2008_encoding)

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dragonwriter
Crockford addresses that in passing at the end of the DEC64 page, claiming
that IEEE 754's decimal floating point types were too inefficient to garner
support.

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tosh
Douglas Crockford talks about why he wants DEC 64 in this talk:
[http://vimeo.com/97419177](http://vimeo.com/97419177) (jump to 41m:20s)

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nilsimsa
This has been brought up before and lots of issues were raised. Including
multiple 0s and lack of normalization.

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taylodl
At least with IEEE 754 you can cast as an INT and collate. Putting the
exponent in the lowest bits prevents that for DEC64. What were they thinking?

