Re: [Gnuplot-info] integer vs. floating point division

[Tait <gnu...@t4...>]

> > I'd say integer division is gradually becoming an anachronism,
> > and the new trend seems to be not just fixed floating-point but
> > full rational-number support or arbitrary- (even infinite-)
> > precision calculations, to avoid frustrating behaviors like
> > ceil(900e-7/12e-7) => 76.
> 
> There you intrigue me.  I have a patch series queued that adds 64-bit
> integer arithmetic with full overflow handling everywhere.  Would it indeed
> be feasible to similarly upgrade the floating point evaluation code to
> provide more  graceful handling of very large numbers?
> The int64 conversion was surprisingly easy so I can believe that
> modernizing the floating point would also be  straightforward.
> But I wouldn't know where to start.  Do you have suggestions?

That particular example will "misbehave" even with 64b doubles
(or at least it did in my test, which is why I used that
particular example). But in general, the only reason I see not
to convert from float to double is that some platforms wouldn't
have built-in double support. I don't work on esoteric platforms
anymore, and obviously Win/Linux/Mac all handle double fine.