On Saturday, 7 January 2023 at 00:52:20 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
Although that difference is a bug, iota does have a special
floating point implementation to prevent the accumulation of
floating point errors.
Thank you for this clarification Ali. I appreciate the fact that
there is a specialized implementation for float types in an
attempt to mitigate error accumulation.
After posting my previous message I became convinced that the
behavior I was seeing was indeed a bug. The specialized fp
implementation simply does not conform to the semantics specified
in the documentation: "If begin < end && step < 0 or begin > end
&& step > 0 or begin == end, then an empty range is returned."
The culprit is this assert in the `in` block of the fp
implementation:
```
assert((end - begin) / step >= 0, "iota: incorrect startup
parameters");
```
This effectively prevents iota from ever returning an empty
range. Git blame points to a commit from March 2015. It's
unbelievable to me this hasn't been fixed in almost 8 years.
Would anyone volunteer to file a bug report? I attempted to do it
myself but I would need to create an account in the Issue
Tracking System, and apparently it doesn't accept gmail addresses
anymore? (facepalm).
Arredondo.
