I use this on my kids.

"What happened at school?"

"Nothing."

"Did you race motorcycles in the hallways?"

"No, we had music!"

I would hate if this became the only numeric type available in JS (in fact, I don't want it at all), but it's dishonest to quote "specification" as you have and then dismiss it as such, as it doesn't claim to be one, the word doesn't appear a single time in it, and if you go through to the github repo, the readme explicitly refers to the page as a "descriptive web page".

In fact, the only line of actual substance in your post is "For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed", and it turns out that's only true for the descriptive web page, not the reference implementation.

> I imagine this project is inspired by the sad state of numerical computing in Javascript, but this proposal will surely only make it worse. The world certainly doesn't need a new, incompatible, poorly-thought-out floating point format.

I'll just quote pg here:

Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?

The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.

As a "specification" this document is laughable. For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed. The comment that object pointers can be stuffed into the coefficient field (usually called 'mantissa') is completely non-sequitur. Frankly I am surprised to see such a big name behind it.

I imagine this project is inspired by the sad state of numerical computing in Javascript, but this proposal will surely only make it worse. The world certainly doesn't need a new, incompatible, poorly-thought-out floating point format.

Compare the level of thought and detail in this "specification" to the level of thought and detail in this famous summary overview of floating point issues: https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/02Numer... ("What every computer scientist should know...")

> DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.

Jesus, I certainly hope not.