Just a crazy idea ... what about if the exponent is a big integer as well? And the mantissa ... guess you can go all crazy, hope this is supported by the library!
My main point against this idea would be that this might drop performance a lot. As far as I know GMP library also uses 64 bit exponent for floating-point types. Is there any reason not to make the exponent type a template parameter so
that the user can chose arbittrarily instead of trying to anticipate future uses of the library?
I would suggest this to be a good solution. At least support of int32 and int64 via template parameter would be vital. Yeah -- the diameter of the observable universe (not the observed universe
-- the physically observable universe) in Plank units (the smallest physically meaningful length according to QM) is about 1.5*2^204, so 9 bits (positive and negative exponents) is all that is required to express the exponent for any physical distance in any physically meaningful units.
I have some experience with implementing multiprecision geometric predicates. At some point I needed to cast 2048 bit big integer to 64 bit double and the problem is that double is not capable to handle it. This is so far the only issue I encountered with limitation of 11 bits exponent. Also we might consider the fact that IEEE754 architecture for 128 bit double has 15 bit exponent the same as for the 80 bit double. Andrii _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost