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Stop using floats (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by nifty@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Float processing is at the hardware level. It needs a way to signal when an unrepresented value would be returned.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My thinking is that a call to the safe division method would check after the division, whether the result is a NaN. And if it is, then it returns an Error-value, which you can handle.

Obviously, you could do the same with a NaN by just throwing an if-else after any division statement, but I would like to enforce it in the type system that this check is done.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I feel like that's adding overhead to every operation to catch the few operations that could result in a nan.

But I guess you could provide alternative safe versions of float operations to account for this. Which may be what you meant thinking about it lol

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

I would want the safe version to be the default, but yeah, both should exist. 🙃