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Comment by bitslayer | Hacker News Reader

I saw the best minds of my generation...

I see your point, but this sort of argument depends on the assumption that productivity/enthusiasm is fungible, which it rarely is. You can't just chain Tom7 to an office desk and say, "ok, now channel your creative energies towards optimizing this Excel macro."

(The other prong of the argument is that this type of work is of little value, which is certainly debatable too.)

One day I was writing an Excel macro, and I wanted to hash something (I forget why), and I was looking for a way to compare hashes in a relatively efficient way, meaning storing them in a built-in VBA data type.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be no convenient data type larger than four bytes, except for double precision floating point. I couldn't come up with a way to control all of the bits in a double, and there were no 64-bit integers, but then I discovered an alternative - there is a 64-bit type called "Currency", which is basically a fixed point decimal usable for my purpose.

So, I suddenly realized I'd created a currency system based on hashes...in Visual Basic.

Coincidentally, one of Tom 7's SIGBOVIK 2018 papers [1] actually describes the emulation of uint8_t with floating point operations and nothing else. A working library is available [2].

[1] http://tom7.org/papers/fluint.pdf

[2] https://github.com/ixchow/fluint8

> Future Work

> Design a processor for which this library is relevant.

Putting the cart in front of the horse ;)

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