Walter Bright Wrote: > > In my experience doing numerical work, loss of a "few bits" of precision > can have order of magnitude effects on the result. The problems is the > accumulation of roundoff errors. Using more bits of precision is the > easiest solution, and is often good enough.
My work is probably not classified as numerical work as I don't much care about the results. I only care about solutions solving the problem. like this: x * 1.2 = 9; I don't care what x should be for this calculation to be 9, as long as there is a x which satisfies the calculation (or does so close enough). What does interest me is that the x found would yield the same result on another computer because as you say; errors accumulate. > > In Java's early days, they went for portability of floating point over > precision. Experience with this showed it to be a very wrong tradeoff, > no matter how good it sounds. Having your program produce the crappiest, > least accurate answer despite buying a powerful fp machine just because > there exists some hardware somewhere that does a crappy floating point > job is just not acceptable. > > It'd be like buying a Ferrari and having it forcibly throttled back to > VW bug performance. More like creating the best ever seating for a VW bug and then expecting it to be even better in the Ferrari; it might be, but most probably, it won't.