From: botp <botpena@...>
Date: 2010-05-12T09:05:31+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby 1.9+ , floats, and decimal

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@gmail.com> wrote:
> Neither floats (regardless of base) nor rationals can represent all
> real numbers.  Each pair of consecutive float values has an infinite
> number of reals which fall in the crack between them.  Neither can
> exactly represent irrational values including Pi, e, sqrt(2) etc. etc.

i hope you are not exaggerating ;-)
everyone knows that pi or e or sqt(2) or 1/3 cannot be express exactly
in decimal form.

the problem w current float representation is that they balk in plain
and simple addition and subtraction operation :(
can we not just fix that at least ?

> For general purpose languages, a combination of integers (possibly
> including arbitrary length integers as in Ruby/Smalltalk, etc) and
> binary floats is probably the best choice for 'default'
> representations, along with giving the programmer to choose
> alternative representations for particular uses based on informed
> trade-offs.

agree totally.

> --
> Rick DeNatale

kind regards -botp