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On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 03:07:52PM -0700, Chris Marrin wrote:
> Actually all machines can have all these data types, it's just a simple 
> matter of software :-)

That's purely intellectual; if a machine doesn't have doubles in hardware,
softawre emulation is uselessly slow.

> For me, I really need to use doubles for two reasons. 
> 1) it is the only practical datatype understood by Lua and

That's not true; I use Lua with lua_Number set to "float", and it works fine.
Of course, I have to bear precision in mind when using it, but it's certainly
practical for many uses.

> 2) it is easier for content 
> authors (non-programmers) to understand 1.5 seconds than 1500000 
> microseconds.

That's an implementation detail; non-programmers don't care how you're
representing times internally.  printf("%i.%06i", i/1000000, i%1000000);

(Just responding to points--if you don't need to target a platform
without doubles, there's probably no major benefit either way.  I
just prefer the predictability of integers, in addition to needing
to avoid doubles.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard