What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

... given any fixed number of bits, most calculations with real numbers will produce quantities that cannot be exactly represented using that many bits. Therefore the result of a floating-point calculation must often be rounded in order to fit back into its finite representation. This rounding error is the characteristic feature of floating-point computation. ...

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^3: Perl 5 numeric type and simplifications by LanX
in thread Perl 5 numeric type and simplifications by pango

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