There are probably a lot of scientific applications (e.g. statistics, audio, 3D graphics) where exponential notation is the norm and there’s an understanding about precision and significant digits/bits. It’s a space where fixed-point would absolutely destroy performance, because you’d need as many bits as required to store your largest terms. Yes, NaN and negative zero are utter disasters in the corners of the IEEE spec, but so is trying to do math with 256bit integers.

For a practical explanation about how stark a difference this is, the PlayStation (one) uses an integer z-buffer (“fixed point”). This is responsible for the vertex popping/warping that the platform is known for. Floating-point z-buffers became the norm almost immediately after the console’s launch, and we’ve used them ever since.

[–] CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

While it's true the PS1 couldn't do floating point math, it did NOT have a z-buffer at all.

https://www.ncesc.com/gaming-faq/does-ps1-have-z-buffer/

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 months ago

What's the problem with -0?
It conceptually makes sense for to negativ values to close to 0 to be represented as -0.
In practice I have never seen a problem with -0.

On NaN: While its use cases can nowadays be replaced with language constructs like result types, it was created before exceptions or sum types. The way it propagates kind of mirrors Haskells monadic Maybe.
We should be demanding more and better wrapper types from our language/standard library designers.