Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>At 06:16 PM 8/9/00 +0000, Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
>>Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> >>
>> >>As an engineer I would really like to know when you are going to
>> >>run out of precision in double - that is forty something bits of mantissa.
>> >>That is more precision than you have in the real world.
>> >
>> >It's not precision, it's resolution. What do you do if your timers return
>> >values in 1/10ths of a second?
>>
>>What is the problem with that?
>
>You can't accurately represent a tenth of a second with floating point
>numbers.
You could if you made 1/10th second the "unit" of the float internally.
>If we're going to handle them, we might as well be exact.
Why - the 1/10 of second is not exact anyway (unless you happen to
have an atomic clock in an appropriate physical enviroment attached to
your machine). A double's mantissa is better than your typical oscillator.
--
Nick Ing-Simmons
