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More often than not, 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3. "Math is hard. Let's go shopping"
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All those examples, yet none from the One True Language: Cobol. Pretty shoddy reporting!
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Most likely because Cobol traditionally doesn't use floating point, so it is outside the scope of the article. Nowadays, you can use floating point with Cobol (according to Wikipedia: Since the 2002 revision), but traditionally, it was all decimal, either as BCD or scaled integer.
Quite a few times, I have had to explain the very idea of BCD to youngsters: They have a university degree in computer science; yet they have never heard about it. Usually, they have a hard time understanding how a computer can do arithmetic on BCD values, and find it hard to trust me when I tell that in the old days, a number of CPU architectures had machine instructions operating directly on BCD.
I believe that several old Cobol compilers never used BCD, but scaled integers. What appeared to you as, say, US dollars with two decimals, was internally treated as integer cents; the decimal point between the dollars and cents were inserted in the output process, but never seen at the internal level.
Maybe the article author could have mentioned: If we stray away from floating point, ... Well, he didn't but limited himself to what the headline says. I wouldn't call that 'shoddy reporting'.
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trønderen wrote: find it hard to trust me when I tell that in the old days, a number of CPU architectures had machine instructions operating directly on BCD.
Not to nit-pick, but:
- The x86 family still has instructions that operate on BCD - AAA, AAS, DAA, DAS, AAM, AAD. These aren't available in Long (64-bit) Mode, IIRC.
- The x87 coprocessor (now part of the x86 processor) still includes the FBLD and FBSTP instructions for loading and storing BCD values. These were made more as aids to binary-decimal conversion than as processing instructions - no BCD arithmetic operation is supported. These instructions are available in Long Mode.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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This is very useful for finance, less useful for scientific and engineering. But then, I suppose that IBM has targeted the z14 at the financial sector.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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trønderen wrote: Quite a few times, I have had to explain the very idea of BCD to youngsters: They have a university degree in computer science; yet they have never heard about it.
I learnt it in high school not that long ago...
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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trønderen wrote: I believe that several old Cobol compilers never used BCD, but scaled integers. What appeared to you as, say, US dollars with two decimals, was internally treated as integer cents; the decimal point between the dollars and cents were inserted in the output process, but never seen at the internal level.
I have never programed Cobol, but I have used the scaled integers many, many times in industry automation. Int only needed 16 bits, float 32 bits (space was an big deal in some projects) and was pretty difficult to be read in binary / hex due to the intern composition.
I used BCD manay times too, but not that much in comparison (specially with 8-Segments displays and to avoid some weird formats due to endianness and signed/unsigned values)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The Manchester “Baby” was the first electronic digital computer to store a program "Baby, baby, baby, baby, bay-bay-bay. Oh, baby, baby, bay-bay-bay"
I think I should leave now
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Kent Sharkey wrote: I think I should leave now
Well, hopefully your electrons won't leak away, so your memory will be intact tomorrow.
And cool article btw.
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Marc Clifton wrote: your electrons won't leak away, so your memory will be intact tomorrow.
Doesn't that depend on whether he uses DRAM, SRAM, or NVRAM, and on whether the hamsters power him down until tomorrow? 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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If you want to fix your phone without going back to the manufacturer, you’re increasingly in luck. Not so much if you’re a company that’s keeping up old software. You bought it - you fix it
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I found myself stumbling across pieces of knowledge and getting frustrated that I can’t explain these concepts clearly. To aggrandize the divulgence of pedantry and embiggen my TPS reports
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Terminology is important. I've been in design meetings where people were in agreement, only to later discover that they meant different things. And the opposite: heated debates where it turned out that both sides were proposing more or less the same thing. As much as anything, the patterns movement did everyone a favor by creating consistent terms for various design techniques. It saves lots of time during design discussions.
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Greg's point is excellent. Mine is, well...
Given that the author cites three resources:
Design Patterns & Refactoring
Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Refactoring
And we can summarize those into the terms "Design Patterns", "Enterprise", and "Refactoring", so when n00b programmers ask me what those are / mean, I usually respond that they are just BS terms for common sense, building your code so more than one user can use it at a time, and making code changes.
No "spidey-sense" needed. Just jaded 40 years of programming experience.
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This website uses GPT-3 to generate regular expressions from plain English and can also explain a regular expression in English Now your AI has two problems
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The operating system now uses brute force attack protection by default, effectively locking the system after ten failed attempts to guess the local password. It didn't already?
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The object was spotted some 300 million years after the Big Bang, making it potentially the oldest known galaxy. It was back when the stars were still incandescent
As opposed to the LED ones we see today
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The most interesting addition we've seen in a while is rolling out to users on the experimental Dev Channel now: a modified version of the taskbar with much-improved handling of app icon overflow when users have too many apps open at once. "How do you like it? More, more, more"
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"We appear to be entering a period of Windows' development where we can expect new features and tweaks to come to the operating system several times a year. "
This scares me. Every significant update (according to Microsoft) has a tendency to reset some settings back to their defaults. Oh joy.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Like any spacecraft, the telescope has encountered micrometeoroids and its sensors have detected six deformations on the telescope's primary mirror panels that have been attributed to strikes. Well, it was nice while it lasted
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Webb, we hardly knew ye.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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The article says the telescope is still functional, although its data will be less accurate.
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HAL 9000 said: This can only be attributed to human error.
I assume (== hope) that NASA et al.'s statistical model for hits took into account that the L2 point would tend to collect (and lose) debris at an enhanced rate...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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