Comment by jcranmer
6 hours ago
I'm literally giving a talk next week who's first slide is essentially "Why IEEE 754 is not a sufficient description of floating-point semantics" and I'm sitting here trying to figure out what needs to be thrown out of the talk to make it fit the time slot.
One of the most surprising things about floating-point is that very little is actually IEEE 754; most things are merely IEEE 754-ish, and there's a long tail of fiddly things that are different that make it only -ish.
The IEEE 754 standard has been updated several times, often by relaxing previous mandates in order to make various hardware implementations become compliant retroactively (eg, adding Intel's 80-bit floats as a standard floating point size).
It'll be interesting if the "-ish" bits are still "-ish" with the current standard.
can you give a brief example? Very intrigued.
> there's a long tail of fiddly things that are different that make it only -ish.
Perhaps a way to fill some time would be gradually revealing parts of a convoluted Venn diagram or mind-map of the fiddling things. (That is, assuming there's any sane categorization.)
I'm interested by your future talk, do you plan to publish a video or a transcript?