Re: [q-lang-users] Re: Newbie questions and comments

[John C. <jc...@re...>]

Albert Graef scripsit:

> Also with double precision floats? Then GMP's bigint implementation must 
> be quite good. (Q uses those for integer arithmetic. So the two test 
> runs I gave were actually GMP vs. machine double precision floats.)

Internally it's typical to do everything with extended-precision floats
(on Intel machines these are 80-bit objects) and then trim to single or
double precision only when storing.

If I were implementing a language from scratch today for anything but
bare-metal programming, I'd probably leave off machine-size integers
altogether, as you have done, and just have doubles and bignums, or even
just doubles (like Perl and Lua).

-- 
John Cowan  jc...@re...  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
Heckler: "Go on, Al, tell 'em all you know.  It won't take long."
Al Smith: "I'll tell 'em all we *both* know.  It won't take any longer."