From: Philipp Meier <meier@...>
Date: 2002-12-28T01:10:25+09:00
Subject: Re: 1210 / 100 = 12? what?


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On Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 12:46:55AM +0900, Lloyd Zusman wrote:
> Philipp Meier <meier@meisterbohne.de> writes:
>=20
> > On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 04:10:59PM +0900, Tom Sawyer wrote:
> >> On Thursday 26 December 2002 11:42 pm, Brian Wisti wrote:

> > And then one could argue that 2/3 should return an instance of "Rationa=
l"
> > which correctly represents the Quotient 2/3 and neither  0.666* in a
> > language like Ruby. Even 10/100 can lead to strang results because 1/10
> > is periodic to a base of 2 (which most modern computers work with).

> I remember back in 1969 in my Introduction to Computer Programming
> course (or whatever it was called), some of the first things we learned
> had to do with fixed point and floating point arithmetic.  We spent a
> good month or so on these and other basic concepts before we were given
> our first program to write.
>=20
> Do they even teach these basics any more?

If I talk for me, I must say that these aspect of computing science came
way to short were I studied. At least we were teached some basics in a
practise of "technical computer science" where we had some fun
connecting ICs to traffic lights and basic arithmetic circuits. But on
the other hand we were introduced into programming with haskell which
was "no fun" for those who came and thought they'd already now
"programming" ;-)

> I'm not trying to disparage anyone here; if something hasn't been
> taught, then no one can be expected to have learned it.
>=20
> But it's disturbing to me to see the number of people who are posting in
> this and other newsgroups in recent years who haven't been exposed to
> the concepts of fixed-point and floating-point arithmetic.  This
> indicates to me that there are many schools these days which don't make
> the effort to teach these basic concepts to their computer science
> students.  The fault is with these schools, and that's sad.

+1 from me.

-billy.


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