I'll take your rant and raise you one...

Flippant disregard for naïveté may be geek-chic, but I live in the real world. That is, while you really do make a valid point, those fourth grade expectations are common, and are consistent in an easily observable way. If I went and told my users that their expectations are merely naive, I would lose.

... shirt, respect, credibility and eventually job.

The best answer noted elsewhere in this thread, is a hardware limitation. The SPARC architecture does not have a way to set the rounding mode for floating point operations. However, x86 Operating Systems (including recent MacOS, but still not Solaris) seems to have a way to reach into the floating point hardware to ask for a NEAR rounding mode. I can sell broken architecture as an excuse (since it is demonstrably true) far better than I can sell broken user expectations (which are not demonstrable at all).

Or, I can cheat, use string_round(), and look like I got a bug fixed where nobody else could do it efficiently. I don't mind cheating, as long as it doesn't cause any real harm. This is such a case, since as BrowserUK dismissively notes above, all rounding is cosmetic anyway.

In reply to Re^3: RFC: Large Floating Point Numbers - Rounding Errors (expectations) by GAVollink
in thread RFC: Large Floating Point Numbers - Rounding Errors by GAVollink

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