1 Oct
2009
1 Oct
'09
1:08 a.m.
On Sep 30, 2009, at 7:17 PM, Michael B. Brutman wrote:
Fred Cisin wrote:
Please re-read what *I* said. Your original post contained:
float elapsed = ticks * 0.85;
Which is what *I* had the <rant> about.
On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
I think that both of you are making assumptions about my education,
upbringing, etc. that are not true and I'd like you to calm down. <rant>
Why do people always seem to want to have elapsed time as a floating
point number?
</rant>
Because some of the CRAP that they learned in school makes them
think that
truncation (or even rounding) to an int value "isn't the RIGHT
answer".
In the XenoSoft Sales Tax Genie, I wrote a very small TSR that
calculated
the sales tax of every California jurisdiction (based on ZIPCODE),
rounded
appropriately to an "exact" cents amount. I NEVER used floating
point.
I do not HAVE any "fraction of a cent" coins!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
I've used that trick in all of my other TCP/IP apps so far - they
all report elapsed time (sometimes with decimal points), and I
managed to do it without ever linking in the floating point library.
I was using this to explore other methods ..
I don't know what CRAP you learned, but I would try to be more
gracious ...
Part of my job is to maintain/manage time for a particular OS. In
that OS all time (internally) is kept as a 64-bit number of
nanoseconds (10**-9 seconds). However, the number of people that
insist that it be converted to a floating point number so that they
can have seconds and fractional seconds (and then want to do math on
it) is astounding. I tend to overreact on this topic because floating
point to represent time is idiotic IMHO especially since some of the
low level conversion constants I deal with are specified in
femtoseconds (10**-15 seconds). If I can do everything necessary to
maintain time in integer values at those precisions then I fail to
understand why anyone needs to deal with time as a floating point
value. In case anyone is wondering, 64-bits of nanoseconds can
represent a time span of over 500 years.
TTFN - Guy