[gmpi] Re: Decision Time: 8.3



Tim Hockin wrote:
On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 05:00:29PM -0600, Mike Berry wrote:

Agreed, but I also think that int should be collapsed into one floating
point type, I feel there is some extra simplicity from handling integer
values as a hinted float type, eg. automation, interpolation etc. I dont
have any religious convition about it though :)


The collapse has a fundamental problem, which is that the range of the int is larger than the range of the float. What I mean by this is that 0x7FFFFFFF can be represented exactly by a 32 bit int, but cannot be represented exactly by a 32 bit float. So the use of floats for ints only works if the mantissa of the float is >= in size to the int. So doubles would work for 32 bit ints, but not 64 bit one. I think that we still need an int type. 


Devils' advocate: round or use floor() or something faster (for x86 there is
a fast cast lib that works well) .  If you use floats to represent ints, you
don't need to be exact.

Tim

If we eliminate ints as a possible data type, as suggested, then everyone has no choice but to use floats and incur the problems they entail.

--
Mike Berry
Adobe Systems


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