[texhax] why not floating-point?

[Pavel Minev Penev]

В деня четвъртък, 16. от септември, 2004 в 13:26:30 GMT -0400, Barbara Beeton мислил:
>     What about adding floating-point arithmetic support to TeX?
> 
> perhaps it could be considered for an extension to a
> tex successor.  but it will never be added to tex
> itself.  when tex was implemented on multiple platforms,
> it was demonstrated that the floating-point arithmentic
> was seriously not the same on all platforms, hence the
> decision to use only a very fine-grained fixed-point
> mechanism.  perhaps the situation has changed now, and
> floating point is (more) uniform.  but that would need
> to be demonstrated, to ensure platform independence.
> 
>     Motivation:  I understand that the main obstacle to implementing truly
>     powerful graphic routines directly via TeX is that TeX cannot handle
>     floating-point arithmetics.  While various external tricks are
>     wonderful, they seem a bit unstable (eg the beauty of PostScripting via
>     packages like eepic, that suddenly becomes unavailable when switching
>     to pdfTeX).
> 
> a worthy goal, but it doesn't outweigh the original
> motivation, which strongly affects the positioning of
> letters in a line of type or symbols in a built-up
> equation.
> 
> in any event, tex itself is frozen, so this is a
> topic for a successor.

See the fp package for fixed-point,
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