From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-11-16T08:32:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Trajectories

On 15 Nov 2009, at 23:02, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
> Rick Denatale wrote:
>> When I was a young lad, it used to be that young programmers took a
>> semester long course on numerical analysis, which started with, and
>> continuously came back to dealing with the properties of floating
>> point numbers.
>>
>> I guess that doesn't happen much anymore.
>
> Again, I could do that or (more likely) find out how to do it.  But  
> why
> bother when wise use of BigDecimal and Rational will completely  
> obviate
> the need?

The physical limitations imposed on arbitrary-precision decimal  
computation by binary representation are something you should know  
*before* arguing that one representation is better than another.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason