From: minforth@gmx.net   
      
   Am 10.07.2025 um 10:50 schrieb Stephen Pelc:   
   > On 10 Jul 2025 at 02:18:50 CEST, "minforth"  wrote:   
   >   
   >> "Industry" can manage well with 32-bit   
   >> floats or even smaller with non-standard number formats.   
   >   
   > My customers beg to differ and some use 128 bit numbers for   
   > their work. In a construction estimate for one runway for the   
   > new Hong Kong airport, the cost difference between a 64 bit FP   
   > calculation and the integer calculation was US 10 million dollars.   
   > This was for pile capping which involves a large quantity of relatively   
   > small differences.   
      
   You are right. "Industry" is one of those non-words that should be   
   used with care, or avoided altogether, before it becomes a tautology.   
      
   IIRC I only had one real application for 128-bit floats: simulation   
   of heat propagation through thick-walled tubes. The simulation   
   involved numerical integration which can be prone to error accumulation.   
   One variant of MinForth's fp-number wordset can be built with gcc's   
   libquadmath library. It is slower, but speed is not always important.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)