Le 06/03/2018 à 05:48, A Z a écrit : > Citation about problems with Java floating point: > https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
This paper is about complex numbers, operation overloading, handling of NaN, /etc./ I don't think that they are making an argument for decimal arithmetic. > People absolutely need decimal accuracy, and not floating point > approximations > Float and double are accurate in base 2, which is as good as base 10 for scientific and engineering applications (nature does not have a preferred base - our use of base 10 is only because human have 10 fingers). Base 10 is useful in some cases like financial applications, but those ones already have their own representation (e.g. integer count of 1/1000 of cents). When numbers are measurements, values like 0.1 are approximation anyway, no matter if using base 2 or base 10. IEEE754 float and double types have hardward acceleration in modern CPU. Consequently IEEE754 is used not only in Java, but also in other languages like C/C++. The C language may give an impression of accuracy because printf can round the last digits, but the actual accuracy is still the same than Java. Martin
