[Cfp-interest 1673] Re: intmax_t removal

[Paul Zimmermann]

       Dear Mike,

> (Some say that integer
> types are needed for efficiency, and that was true 40 years ago, but on
> 32-bit+ architectures today integer multiply and divide are often slower
> than the floating-point operations...)

then I am part of "some". To implement arbitrary precision arithmetic,
20 years ago some people did use floating-point types because you could
have 53 bits per word instead of 32 bits, and the efficiency was comparable.

Nowadays nobody uses floating-point types anymore to compete with GNU MP.

And even for floating-point computations, using integer types might be
faster [1,2].

Best regards,
Paul

[1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01227877
[2] https://members.loria.fr/PZimmermann/talks/quad.pdf