Re: F08 support of floating decimal?

On Dec 27, 8:33 pm, glen herrmannsfeldt <g...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
No rule against trinary addition, but I don't know any that
do it.  Then again, base 3 floating point is also rare.
Legal for Fortran, though.

Trinary has some interesting properties. In balanced
trinary (where the digits are zero, one, and minus one)
rounding to nearest is the same operation as truncating.
For calculations involving lots of multiplies I've been
told (and even understood it at one time) that trinary
has some slightly better round-off properties - something
to do with being 3 nearer to the base of natural logarithms
than 2. I don't expect to see any trinary hardware anytime
soon.

--
J. Giles

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C. A. R. Hoare
.

Relevant Pages

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