it would be nice in one's project if you could basically say "use
BigDecimal wherever you normally would have used a float", just to get the
benefit but maintain ease of coding/readability etc - anyone know if this is
possible? Would it be enough to override Float's initializer and return a
BigDecimal instead?
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Rick DeNatale <rick.denat...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:21 AM, David Chelimsky <dchelim...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Greg Hauptmann
>> <greg.hauptmann.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I've gone with the following
>> > ai.amount.should == BigDecimal('-323.03')
>> > However I'm still a bit surprised that Ruby itself does allow a good
>> "=="
>> > test between a Float and a BigDecimal. Perhaps there's a reason that
>> I'm
>> > missing?
>>
>> Very telling is this:
>>
>> >> require 'bigdecimal'
>> => true
>> >> BigDecimal.new(3333333.0) == 3333333.0
>> TypeError: can't convert Float into String
>> from (irb):4:in `new'
>> from (irb):4
>>
>> As for why, I think you'll get some good insights if you post the
>> ruby-lang mailing list, but I can take shot.
>>
>> BigDecimal has explicit precision. Float does not. Imagine the
>> developer at the bank explaining that the thousands of dollars
>> discrepancy last year was due to an average miscalculation of 0.00005
>> per transaction because sometimes the code used BigDecimal, and
>> sometimes it used Float.
>>
>
> Even more telling is this:
> irb(main):001:0> 1.0 / 3.0
> => 0.333333333333333
> irb(main):002:0> (1.0 / 3.00) == 0.333333333333333
> => false
>
> This has little to do with rspec or Ruby, and everything to do with floats.
>
> Floats are approximations, it's a mistake to thing of them as equivalent to
> the mathematical concept of real numbers, or even rational numbers. There
> are several issues here including
>
> 1. Floats are not infinite precision, they have a fixed number of bits or
> digits, this means that in-between any two consecutive real number which CAN
> be represented by a float, there are an infinite number of reals which
> cannot.
>
> 2. As is the case in decimal fractions, where some rational numbers such as
> 1/3 cannot be represented without an infinite number of decimal digits,
> there are similar values dependent on the base used for the float
> representation.
>
> There's a whole branch of computer science, Numerical Analysis, comprised
> in large part of understanding how Floats differ from the mathematical
> ideal.
>
>
> --
> Rick DeNatale
>
> Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale
>
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>
--
Greg
http://blog.gregnet.org/
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