Sum of 1 to 1000000000 in different programming languages

Post by gsnedders » Tue, Aug 06, 2013, 9:13 AM UTC

mistercow wrote: post #23

tootie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this before and never understood why. Why?

Presumably because it allows you to do anything involving double precision or 32-bit integer arithmetic, and performance was not originally a major consideration. It's pretty rare to need more than 53 bits of precision (and was even rarer for JS's original intent), so it makes sense that the numeric type is kept simple. Edit: and to clarify, the advantage is that this makes basic implementation extremely simple. Only…

Post by gsnedders » Wed, Aug 07, 2013, 6:35 PM UTC

mistercow wrote: post #82

gsnedders wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance was always enough of a consideration that even BE's original implementation had both int32 and double types internally, though black-box unobservable (as in the black box, everything appears as a double).

That is interesting. As a side note, I'll bet you could have actually observed the difference via timing at the time, assuming you knew what hardware you were working on. On an early Pentium, a floating point add would have taken up to 3 times as long as an integer add (depending on implementation), so by comparing in a loop, you might be able to tell if a given value was being treated as an integer or a double.