According to Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:

In 50 years the most I’ve ever done with floating point was coding some >builtin functions for the Iron Spring PL/I compiler.

In the 1980s I worked on a product called Javelin which was a time series modelling package that looked sort of like a spreadsheet. It ran on IBM
PCs, 8088 or 286, preferably with an x87.

I got to do all of the financial functions which involved a whole lot of floating point arithmetic. Calculating the Internal Rate of Return for
a series of N payments was finding the root of an Nth degree polynomial.
Bond yields are based on IRR with soem extra confusion for partial
time periods. I managed to get them to match the official answers
but it was tricky.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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On Tue, 24 Dec 2024 04:20:30 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

I got to do all of the financial functions which involved a whole lot of floating point arithmetic. Calculating the Internal Rate of Return for
a series of N payments was finding the root of an Nth degree polynomial.
Bond yields are based on IRR with soem extra confusion for partial time periods. I managed to get them to match the official answers but it was tricky.

In 1985, I did something similar for a finance company that leased out photocopiers -- in COBOL. I don’t recall needing to do anything like find roots of polynomials. I think it was just a matter of plugging in the specified numbers for principal, interest, payment periods etc and
printing out a table of payments.

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On 2024-12-24 06:46, rbowman wrote:

On Tue, 24 Dec 2024 04:20:30 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

I got to do all of the financial functions which involved a whole lot of
floating point arithmetic. Calculating the Internal Rate of Return for
a series of N payments was finding the root of an Nth degree polynomial.
Bond yields are based on IRR with soem extra confusion for partial time
periods. I managed to get them to match the official answers but it was
tricky.

In the early '80s I worked on a handheld pH meter that used an 8049. Unfortunately I can't remember how I got from the A/D measuring the
voltage on a Ross electrode to pH. Another programmer worked in parallel
for an ion concentration meter using the same hardware but a different
custom LCD display. I do remember we couldn't shoehorn both into the same device.

The Z-80 based bench models definitely were using FP. Much of the work
I've done in the past 25 years has involved GIS, often using doubles
rather that floats to get the necessary precision.

Horses for courses.

I did data acquisition on PC in the 90's. We used a card that would do
the A/D conversion. The thing had 10 bit (I think) precision (integer)
which we converted to voltages (or the real magnitude, like rpm,
centigrade, bar..) as floats. The entire software then worked with
floats, but the connection to outside was integers. DAC work that way.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

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