On 5/27/2015 1:29 PM, Nicolas Cellier wrote: > > > 2015-05-27 14:24 GMT+02:00 Sean P. DeNigris <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>>: > > Nicolas Cellier wrote > > Also because it's good to know that 1/10 ~= 0.1 > > Why? It's an implementation detail. #= unlike #== is IIUC supposed to be > logical to the domain, and math doesn't make any distinction about how > bits > are stored ;) > > > > Nope, it's more than a detail. > It's what every engineer should know about floating point. > If you think float == real number then you'll be screwed by many unexpected > behavior, like why 0.1+0.1+0.1 ~= 0.3 etc...
Totally agree until now :) > So you have to somehow unlearn what you were teached in math, because it's > simply not true with float. I think this is not well formulated and it might actually deepen the misunderstanding. There is no math to be unlearned. There is just some extra info that has to be remembered about computers. I don't think anybody was ever taught in math class that 0.33 equals 1/3. Not even that 0.3333333333333333 equals 1/3. Not even in the US (although there is a state where a guy introduced a law to change the value of Pi to 3, to make things simpler :)). Here we have the same situation. For these particular floats, their literal value, as expressed in base 10 digits (which is what we do when we input them in source code), has no exact representation (in binary, which is how they are actually compiled/stored), so from the very start these floats are just an approximation. Perhaps the compiler should warn people every time they write such a literal. This would be easy to do and I think it would save people a lot of heartburn. It is very revealing to look at 0.1 asTrueFraction or at 273.15 asTrueFraction , and then it will become obvious why these floats are not equal with those fractions. Whereas if you take the very same base 10 literals, but not in float format but as scaledDecimals, the comparisons evaluate to true, as they should: 1/10 = 0.1s and 273.15s = (5463/20). Florin
