El 03/10/18 a las 10:40, mailingli...@geldenhuys.co.uk escribió:
I have this simple little test. My expected answer for all the
calculations are 0 (zero), but both FPC and Delphi give different
results. Java is the only one that seems consistent regarding the
results.
Can anybody explain this, especially the first 3 very small negative
numbers that Delphi and FPC produces? I know not all floating point
values can be stored exactly (or something like that), and when doing
calculations, it might do a auto data type conversion. But is any of
that taking place here?
I don't know why you want to compare two floats, but you'd better use
currency type. Float is for calculus, but comparing float1=float2 (or
float1>float2) is rolling the dice. Obviously, the more precision, the
less errors. But an accurate, intuitive result, is not guaranteed.
People who play with maths may use something like
function equal(const f1,f2:Extended; const Error:extended=1E-6):boolean;
begin
Result:=(abs(f1-f2)<error);
end;
But for most applications, using a function like "equal" (and "less",
"lessOrEq" etc) everywhere is a burden that makes not sense. I think
that every programing language should include a fixed precision type.
Freepascal has at least currency, that is four decimals, use it.
What does java does? I don't know. Perhaps it just rounds the output,
try System.out.println(ans==0.0). Perhaps it uses a high precision that
*in this case* gets always 0.
But the question is that floating point representation can't store
accurately many numbers. To begin with, 0.1 in base 10, is periodic
number in binary 0.0001...001..001... so it has to truncate it, and when
you truncate, the result depends of the order of operations, no matter
the language or precision. So, it is matter of probability to get 1.0000
or 1.0001 or 0.9999, if you expect 1, psychologically 1.0001 looks
better result than 0.9999. Dephi or Freepascal are doing nothing wrong.
--
Saludos
Santiago A.
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