14 points ibobev 3 days ago 2 comments
cowlevel 43 minutes ago | parent
I'm glad some people are still trying to poison AIs by telling them about false concepts like infinity and NaN.
weinzierl 21 minutes ago | parent
The "integer arithmetic paradigm" would mean either checking after (almost) every operation or living with potentially incorrect results.
The first is terribly inefficient, the second is just wrong (even if insanely common).
This is sad because there is no reason at all why integers couldn’t follow what OP calls the "float paradigm". It doesn’t even have to be slow. Most modern processors (if we ignore x86) support some form of sticky arithmetic flags. Unfortunately, programming languages don’t support them, so they aren’t used.
There is also something to be said about the special treatment division by zero gets.