Floating point numbers simply cannot be stored precisely on a computer.
I know what you mean, but it's not what you said. {grin}

Insert Some at the beginning of that sentence to make it true. I can certainly represent "0.5" precisely in IEEE floating point. And actually, it might make more sense to say:

Most fixed-decimal values cannot be represented precisely as binary floating-point numbers, no matter what the precision, because 1/10th is an infinite repeating fraction in binary. Unless the number is an integer divided by a power of two, you'll get some sort of truncation error.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: Re (tilly) 2: Filthy Floats by merlyn
in thread Filthy Floats by THuG

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