Q Numbers Redux · Back in July I wrote about Q numbers, which make it possible to compare numeric values using a finite automaton. It represented a subset of numbers as 14-hex-digit strings. In a remarkable instance of BDD (Blog-Driven Development, obviously) Arne Hormann and Axel Wagner figured out a way to represent all 64-bit floats in at most ten bytes of UTF-8 and often fewer. This feels nearly miraculous to me; read on for heroic bit-twiddling ... [1 comment]
