I've often wondered about trying Maple (any good?).
Anyway, here is a reply from Wolfram tech support, turns out I wasn't
using Mathematica correctly (a common occurrence with me, not a simple
app to use). Os other were correct, 0.036 is not base-2
representable, and this explains the integer round-down "error" first
reported in this thread.
======
I believe Mathematica is working correctly.
As specified in help of RealDigits, RealDigits[x]normally returns a list of
digits whose length is equal to Precision[x].
Please use the correct precision.
RealDigits[0.036`100, 2, 100]
returns:
{{1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0,
0,
1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1,
1,
1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0,
1,
1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1,
1,
0, 0, 1}, -4}
