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Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel

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On Sat, 14 Nov 2015 21:53:57 +0000, root wrote:

> 
> But hey, I found a decent new book: "Handbook of Floating Point Arithmetic"
> by Jean-Michel Muller and a slew of others, with most being in France and Europe.
> I guess the Amerikans can't tell the trees from the forest, if you know what
> I mean.  Anyway it's ISBN 978-0-8176-4704-9 (at the usual place).
> 

Hey, Podolsky.  I barely get past two pages in this book and I'm already
bowled over.

Back in the 1950's the Russkies (Soviets) developed a ternary computer
called Setun.  That's TERNARY and not binary or decimal.

Very strange, one would think.

But it seems that it's a fantastic idea. For one thing, rounding
to nearest is equivalent to truncation!  Floating point efficiency
is also maximized, at a constant MAX_FP, by using a radix of 3.

Also check this out from http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm

"Simplicity, economy and elegance of computer architecture are the direct
and practically very important consequence of the ternarity, more exactly
– of representation of data and instructions by symmetrical (balanced) code,
i.e. by code with digits 0, +1, -1. In opposite to binary code there is no
difference between "signed" and "unsigned" number. As a result the amount of
conditional instructions is decrease twice and it is possible to use them more
easily; the arithmetic operations allow free variation of the length of operands
and may be executed with different lengths; the ideal rounding is achieved simply
by truncation, i.e. the truncation coincides with the rounding and there is the
best approximation the rounding number by rounded."

It seems that those Russkies aren't the backward peons the propaganda of
the West makes them out to be.

Shoot!  I should have gone to school in Moscow.

Ciao.

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Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel root <root@localhost.localdomain> - 2015-11-14 21:53 +0000
  Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel Fabian Russell <root@localhost.localdomain> - 2015-11-14 22:35 +0000
    Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel noTthaTguY <abu.kuanysh05@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 15:23 -0800
    Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-11-14 23:29 +0000
      Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel Fabian Russell <root@localhost.localdomain> - 2015-11-15 00:00 +0000
        Re: Floating Point - Ping F. Russel jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-11-15 01:04 +0000

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