IEEE 754

People had pretty much converged on floating-point arithmetic, but different companies did it differently.

But one of the things that had happened In the late 80s is that the IEEE 754 standard came out and companies started moving over to that.

So if you looked at the programming language specs that were around in the 70s and 80s, they said implementation defined because IBM did floating point completely differently from digital equipment.

Completely differently from HP and, you know, all these companies that mostly don't exist anymore.

And there was this war about what 2 plus 2 meant.

It eventually converged in IEEE 754, but there were some ongoing food fights in IEEE 754.

You get companies like Intel who decided...

Yes, IEEE 754, but the spec hadn't quite frozen.

C++ is a perfectly cromulent language, but the template meta-programming time in C++ is kind of awful, right? You can do an awful lot of things in C++.

You know, like way back in the Stone Age, I think I had implemented, you know, IEEE 754, like, uh, floating point in C++ templates as a thing, so I could actually compute constants to put into arrays in, you know, some ancient wavelet thing that I did, like way before I ever knew Haskell ever existed, right? But like, if I'm going to compute optimal einsum accumulation order, that's an NP-complete problem.

Mm-hmm.

And so now I'm compiling that at template meta-programming time in C++, so I have all the ease of use of C++ and all the speed of an interpreter.