C Floating point arithmetic

[Roy Smith]

> [...] in most cases where the loss of speed might really matter, double
> precision is usually needed anyway to get meaningful results.  Some
> people, though, judge code more on how fast it runs than on whether it
> performs a useful function correctly.

	Bullcookies!  A lot of people (like me) work with primary data
which is only accurate to 2 or 3 significant digits.  It takes a hell of a
lot of roundoff error in the 7th decimal place to make any difference in
the accuracy of the final result.  Why should I pay (in CPU time) for
digits 8-15 when I don't need them?  Why do you think they make machines
with both single and double precision hardware to begin with?
-- 
Roy Smith <allegra!phri!roy>
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016