From: no.email@nospam.invalid   
      
   minforth  writes:   
   > Kahan was also overly critical of dynamic Unum/Posit formats.   
   > Time has shown that he was partially wrong:   
   > https://spectrum.ieee.org/floating-point-numbers-posits-processor   
      
   I don't feel qualified to draw a conclusion from this.  I wonder what   
   the numerics community thinks, if there is any consensus.  I remember   
   being dubious of posits when I first heard of them, though Kahan   
   probably influenced that.  I do know that IEEE 754 took a lot of trouble   
   to avoid undesirable behaviours that never would have occurred to most   
   of us.  No idea how well posits do at that.  I guess though, given the   
   continued attention they get, they must be more interesting than I had   
   thought.   
      
   I saw one of the posit articles criticizing IEEE 754 because IEEE 754   
   addition is not always associative.  But that is inherent in how   
   floating point arithmetic works, and I don't see how posit addition can   
   avoid it.  Let a = 1e100, b = -1e100, and c=1.  So mathematically,   
   a+b+c=1.  You should get that from (a+b)+c in your favorite floating   
   point format.  But a+(b+c) will almost certainly be 0, without very high   
   precision (300+ bits).   
      
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