Re: Decorated intervals ARE intervals...
Dan
On 2 Jul 2011, at 20:25, Dan Zuras Intervals wrote:
> You are giving me a level 4 objection to a level 1 problem.
Level 1 must be unaware of levels 2,3 and 4 but the people who design it need to be aware.
> But let me answer it all the same.
>
> There are many solutions starting with aligning 17-byte
> objects to 32-byte windows.
>
> But the one we should be considering is the use of optimizing
> compilers that recognise when the decoration may be neglected
> (perhaps nearly always) & trims the decorated interval down
> to 16-bytes as well as eliminating the decoration computation
> that is known by the compiler to be unneeded.
Yes, those make sense to me. I remember well how 754-1985 was initially criticised as so slow that no one would implement it, or if they did, no one would prefer it to (Ugh) IBM hexadecimal FP.
> And, isn't assured computing our number 1 goal here?
>
> For if we give the programmer ways to routinely defeat that
> goal then none of our work is worth the effort.
Yep.
John