Re: [Numpy-discussion] please change mean to use dtype=float

[Bill B. <wb...@gm...>]

On 9/20/06, Charles R Harris <cha...@gm...> wrote:
> > I guess I'm not really aware of the float96 type ...
> > Is that a "machine type" on any system ?  I always thought that -- e.g .
> > coming from C -- double is "as good as it gets"...
> > Who uses float96 ?  I heard somewhere that (some) CPUs use 80bits
> > internally when calculating 64bit double-precision...
> >
> I'm going to side with Travis here. It is only a default and easily
> overridden. And yes, there are precisions greater than double. I was using
> quad precision back in the eighties on a VAX for some inherently ill
> conditioned problems. And on my machine long double is 12 bytes.
>

And on Intel chips the internal fp precision is 80bits.  The D
programming language even exposes this 80-bit floating point type to
the user.
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/type.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/faq.html#real

--bb