From: David MacMahon <davidm@...>
Date: 2013-02-22T09:19:46+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:52660] Re: [ruby-trunk - Bug #7829] Rounding error in Ruby Time


On Feb 20, 2013, at 10:57 PM, Tanaka Akira wrote:

> I hope people supports mrkn's proposal:
> http://www.slideshare.net/mrkn/float-is-legacy
> 
> The proposal fixes this issue and abolish unintuitiveness of float literal.

It is an interesting idea.  I like the concept, but when dealing with large amounts of floating point data (even using NArray and/or GSL) it seems like there could be a lot of conversion between Rational and Float.  I also wonder/worry about the performance of Rational when dealing with very large or very small numbers especially for addition/subtraction when the LCM must be computed on very large denominator values.  Then again, if I really care about computational performance I'll write a C extension.  More often I just want things to work correctly and performance is a secondary concern.  I guess I'm not opposed to the idea, but not a proponent either.  It would be very interesting to see it in action.

Dave