On 12.10.2012 03:03, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Any half-decent processor supports the IEEE-754 standard. If it doesn't, it's broken by design.
Even in user-space, you're not giving up that much speed in practical terms, at least not for my needs. The new decimal module in Python 3.3 is less than a factor of 10 times slower than Python's floats, which makes it pretty much instantaneous to my mind :)
I will not have any effect on the flops rate. The other stuff the interpreter must do when using floats (allocating and deleting float objects on the heap, initializing new objects, etc.) will dominate the run-time performance. Even a simple check for divide-by-zero (as we have today) will be more expensive than using another numerical context inside the hardware. Sturla