- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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More people need to learn to use Rational types. A pretty large majority of the numbers that people care about in real life can easily be represented by a ratio of integers, and they allow math with perfect precision.
Or just BigDecimal or an equivalent if rational types aren’t easy to use in your language (e.g if you’d have to literally enter the denominator and numerator).
Someone posted this article a while back that goes into more detail on some alternatives, as well as contains one of the best and most intuitive explanations of floating point that I’ve ever read.
Reject modernity, return to COBOL.
There is a paper titled “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic” by David Goldberg. It’s a bit theoretical, but IMO it’s a must-read for any programmer doing more than the occasional floating point calculation. It goes beyond just limited precision and rounding errors.
Javascript: The result is “0.10.2”
PHP: 0.3*
* with default precision
Jemapelle
