On Friday 14 August 2009 08:38:33 John M. Steele wrote: > Yes. Computers, calculators, etc only use decimal. In the "real world", > you almost never have the nice clean coefficients where fractions really > work.
Computers use binary, in which 0.1 cannot be represented exactly. They can be programmed to use rational numbers. In algebra, you are more likely to get denominators like 7 and 17 than powers of 5 times powers of 2. Pierre
