Re: [GD-General] The joy of type aliasing and C

[Alen L. <ale...@cr...>]

>> Generally, trying to look at a float as if it's some kind of a
>> black box that stores real numbers, is kinda silly.
>I think this depends entirely on the application's domain.  A lot of
>applications will merrily use a float and perform floating point
>operations and have no care at all whether the underlying
>implementation is IEEE-754 or some freakish VAX implementation.

True, but I happen to work in such domain that just I have to care. But I
guess we all do. ;)

>You can inspect an implementation's internal representation by using
><float.h> and inspecting the associated predefined constants.  These
<...>
I am aware of that, but I don't find it particularly useful, except for
stuff like: assert(FLT_MANT_DIG>=24). Honestly, have you ever made an app
that dynamically adjust itself depending on number of bits in mantissa? Most
code I see uses things like typedef int INT32; and adjusts it with #ifs for
different platforms. Not to say that a generic int shouldn't be available,
for people that want it, but for sanity sake, standards could just add
int16, int32 etc. and get over with the mess. Am I wrong?

Alen