Oddly, I still do integer math, scale down, and drop a visual d.p. as=20
needed.
Perhaps I should benchmark 18F floating point to set myself straight!

Cheers,
-Neil.



On 8/25/2016 3:02 PM, Denny Esterline wrote:
> I think we just touched on the core of the change. 20 years ago, when I w=
as
> just getting into microcontrollers, I bit-banged lots of different things=
..
> I2C, SPI, UART, PWM, RC servo timing, even USB on the AVR parts, I've don=
e
> them all and more with nothing but GPIO and instruction counts. Today, I
> can't remember the last time I bit-banged a common protocol. The silicon
> has become so much more capable while the price has been falling.
>
> I recall spending days playing with tricks of integer math to get
> resolution and scaling without using floating point. "Because
> floating-point takes too long" A couple weeks ago I was walking a junior
> (three months out of college, so green I have to water him) through a
> recent project. I was going down the path of integer math, he declared th=
em
> as floats.... I was about to go into full lecture mode when we actually
> benchmarked the code - the processor still spends 99% of it's time waitin=
g
> for new data. There's just nothing to be saved in that project to justify
> the time it takes to "improve" the code.
>
> -Denny (who is quickly becoming an old curmudgeon)

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