What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

-brazil- writes "Every programmer forum gets a steady stream of novice questions about numbers not 'adding up.' Apart from repetitive explanations, SOP is to link to a paper by David Goldberg which, while very thorough, is not very accessible for novices. To alleviate this, I wrote The Floating-Point Guide, as a floating-point equivalent to Joel Spolsky's excellent introduction to Unicode. In doing so, I learned quite a few things about the intricacies of the IEEE 754 standard, and just how difficult it is to compare floating-point numbers using an epsilon. If you find any errors or omissions, you can suggest corrections."

Comments

Re:What school are these programmers going to?

[larry bagina]

At one previous job, of about 15 programmers, I think fewer than 5 had a CS degree. At another, of 3 programmers, not one had a CS degree. There are more copy-paste programmers than ever (especially with low barriers to entry -- php, python, javascript, vb/vba, etc).