Floating-Point Tricks
July–August 1997
“Oh, you work with computers? Gee, I can't even balance my checking account!”
Don't you just love it when some friend comes up with this one? So much of what we do with computers has nothing to do with arithmetic. Word processing, painting, stuff that even mathphobes can appreciate. But in the rendering game there's no substitute for nice juicy numbers. And what kinds of numbers are they?
There are basically two popular numeric types inside a computer, floating point and fixed point (which I have sometimes referred to as scaled integers). In my career of number crunching, I've oscillated back and ...
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