Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!lavaca.uh.edu!jane!math1h3
From: math1h3@jane.uh.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Mac of the 90's: FLOPS, MegaFLOPS?
Message-ID: <5338.25af60d1@jane.uh.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 90 23:09:37 GMT
Organization: University of Houston
Lines: 24


  What would I like to see in the Mac of the 90's?  A better floating point
environment, that's what.  Here are some obvious improvements I'd like to see:

1.  Support for single-precision and double precision arithmetic and
transcendental functions in whatever coprocessor is used.  It seems terribly
wasteful to always do extended precision arithmetic and transcendental
functions when the user/programmer might only want or need single precision.
How often does one really want 19 digits of accuracy?

2.  SANE should recognize when a coprocessor is present and pass through all
transcendental function calls.  Really, how much more accurate is SANE?  It
certainly isn't worth the slowdown it produces, not to me it isn't.

Apple, please recognize that SOME of us use Macs to do what computers were
originally designed for: crunching numbers.  The Mac has nice I/O features, but
it is still pretty slow at crunching numbers, considering what processors are 
used.

BTW, SOME of us write programs on the Mac for our personal use, or for
research.  One shouldn't have to be a professional programmer to do that.

David Wagner
My opinions are completely seperate from my employer's