From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-09-01T00:33:53+09:00
Subject: Re: 0.06 == 0.06 returns false in Ruby?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Dan Zwell wrote:
> Michael wrote very convincingly that there is no simple solution that
> will work in all cases. I'm convinced, at least. If there is no solution
> that works 100% of the time, we can't give the illusion that there is.
> To do so would be to teach bad programming practices to newcomers, and
> that's not fair.
> 
> The current "==" in okay because it works the way a moderately
> experienced programmer would expect. A perfect "==" that could deal with
> floats would be even better, but we aren't gonna get that. A "==" that
> seems like magic and almost always works is really pretty dangerous.
> 
> Dan
> 
> 

Yeah ... even people like me who have spent several decades in this
branch of computing need to be reminded of these things occasionally.
What *I* wish Ruby had for scientific number-crunching is built-in
floating point arrays, rather than having to pass potential large
objects into and out of C language libraries to get number crunching done.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFG2DTf8fKMegVjSM8RAudJAJ9wOyvmdtgSRgVVUpbXem6nLUpfKQCdEspD
YgYD17sas15mJA/Q1kGMwJQ=
=kZx0
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----