Comment by anthk
11 hours ago
- You can do the Mandelbrot set with integers. In Forth it's 6 lines.
- Coincidentally, Forth promotes a fixed point philosophy.
- Forth people defined the IEEE754 standard on floating point, because they knew how to do that well in software.
> - Forth people defined the IEEE754 standard on floating point, because they knew how to do that well in software.
IEEE 754 was principally developed by Kahan (in collaboration with his grad student, Coonen, and a visiting professor, Stone, whence the name KCS draft), none of whom were involved with Forth in any way that I am aware. And the history is pretty clear that the greatest influence on IEEE 754 before its release was Kahan's work with Intel developing the 8087.
I'm a big fan of Kahan's work. I am just sad that the NaN remains terribly misunderstood.
The signalling NaN, however, turned out to be quite useless and I abandoned it.
I think the Zortech C++ compiler was the first one to fully support NaN with the Standard library.
I think the 1985's standard/propotal from the Forth Vendor Group set a precedent.