dsimcha wrote:
You, my friend, have obviously never used a computer algebra system (my favorite is Maxima) at all seriously. I'm not saying it's a practical solution in the context of this discussion, but it is a possible solution in a lot of cases. Basically, if you can't compute something exactly, you do the math symbolically (but programmatically) for as long as possible. You convert to a floating point number only when it's explicitly asked for.
I do understand that if you have a full symbolic representation, you can do so with zero losses. But Kevin's proposal was not that, it was for a ratio representation.
All it represents symbolically is division. There are plenty of other operations.
