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Since the integration of the floating point coprocessor in the x86 processors nobody really thought about floating point. Now they are ubiquitous and a high percentage of users think about it as nescessary. Joseph Darcy talks about what every computer programmer should know about floating point arithmetic. After this you understand, why floating point is quite unusual in many commercial software. Floating point arithmetic is such an unaccurate stuff, unusable when both sides of your quarterly report has to match. This fact enables the development of a processor (the UltraSPARC T1) with only one FPU without beeing slow in many tasks.