If that is a serious question, then the answer is that if you want to take advantage of floating point hardware you are in general limited to those representations that the hardware understands.
Also, most floating point representations have a binary field for what is effectively the significant digits of the number you are representing, and thus there are some conversion and roundoff errors built into the representation. It is of course possible to use something more akin to a BCD representation, and if you are willing to live with the performance impact, then that is fine. That should be, however, another type, because in many cases the performance loss is unacceptable and the roundoff errors are insignificant. On Tuesday 12 November 2002 07:10 am, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote: > Lennart Augustsson wrote: > > The number 5.2 is stored > > > > as a slightly different number as a Float, but the toRational function > > is exact > > so it gives you the number corresponding to the internal representation. > > Take a course on numerical analysis. :) > > Nope. Take a course entitled: > Why all you zombies must remain forever slaves of IEEE-something (477?), > and why you should be happy with this. > > Jerzy Karczmarczuk > > _______________________________________________ > Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users -- Seth Kurtzberg M. I. S. Corp [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-480-661-1849 (GMT-7) _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users