Re: A possible structure of the datatype system for OWL 2 (related to ISSUE-126)

On Jul 10, 2008, at 11:13 AM, Rob Shearer wrote:

>>  Some machine's don't really have single float hardware, instead  
>> rounding from double float.
>
> I'm not sure that's relevant: all machines can mimic single float  
> (i.e. the double hardware can do single rounding after every  
> operation).

Yes. I was suggesting there is little or no benefit to restricting to  
single float.

> I'd be more interested in hearing how big a user base double- 
> precision floats really have. Are many scientific data sets encoded  
> using doubles?
>
> For the record, I'd wouldn't mind requiring double-precision floats  
> but only 32-bit integers. Minimal implementations of such a spec  
> could use a single homogeneous representation for numbers in that  
> case.

Is it that common that current machines have 32 bit integer but not  
64 bit integer arithmetic?

I am more concerned about the float than the integer size,  
notwithstanding my comments about 128 bit float. In that case I was  
thinking about building for the future, and I expect that 64 and 128  
bit integer arithmetic will commonly available soon, if not immediately.

Perhaps worth poking around how often xsd:long is used that would be  
the motivation for 64 bit.

-Alan