FW: [computer-go] Using floating point sounds very strange to me

["Mark Boon" <tesujisoftware@xxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Pogonyshev [mailto:pogonyshev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 13:36
> To: tesujisoftware@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; computer-go
> Subject: Re: [computer-go] Using floating point sounds very strange to
> me
>
>
> Mark Boon wrote:
> > Personally I don't see any reason to use floating-point
> calculations in a
> > Go program.
>
> I believe the main reason of using floating points in move valuation in
> GNU Go is the readability.  It's natural to value a move to 1.5 points
> instead of say 0x18000.  Since this is no way a time-critical piece of
> code, readability is one of the most important aspects here.
>

Like I said: mostly personal preference. Whether you represent 1.5 as 1.5,
3, 1500 or 0x18000 and find one more readable than another is all debatable.
Whatever you choose as internal representation isn't going to appear in your
code as numbers very much (I hope). Displaying such number on the screen as
1.5 or anything else seems to me a formatting or display issue that has no
place in the actual go-playing internals of a Go program, but should be
isolated to the front-end which can be tailored to personal preference
without affecting any (optimal) internal representation. But again: it's
mostly about personal preference.

And as soon as someone chose one way, for whatever reason, right or wrong,
the effort of changing it to another representation may not be worthwhile.

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