From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2007-11-29T12:49:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Bizarre Floating point errors in Ruby? Serious bug?


On Nov 28, 2007, at 4:20 PM, MenTaLguY wrote:
> This comes up a lot, and I guess the thing that most people have a
> hard time wrapping their heads around here is the fact that floating
> point numbers don't obey the laws of basic math -- not exactly.

That and the fact that internally numbers are represented in base 2
and externally they are represented in base 10.  Unfortunately there
is not a one-to-one mapping between the two representations leading
to inexact conversions and confusion.  If evolution had given us four
fingers on each hand and we counted in base 8 then maybe we could
have avoided these problems. :-)

Gary Wright