The Trouble With Rounding Floats

lukfil writes "We all know of floating point numbers, so much so that we reach for them each time we write code that does math. But do we ever stop to think what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really trust it?"

Comments

I am Intel of Borg

[www.sorehands.com]

I am Intel of Borg, you will be approximated.

There have been many examples, such as the original pentium bug. Of course, there was a bug in Windows Calc, it was 2.01 - 2.0 = 0 (If I remember correctly).

Re:Not news.

[mcrbids]

Using a float to represent monetary amounts and expecting them to be free of rounding errors is as stupid as using integers to store zip codes and wondering where the leading zeros went from all the addresses in New England.

Hrrmm, well...

That would explain our lack of customer response in New England...