Shouldn't it autopromote to Bignum at that point? On 8/27/09, Michael Zedeler <mich...@zedeler.dk> wrote: > Karl Brodowsky wrote: >> Michael Zedeler schrieb: >>> Well... maybe. How do you specify the intended precision, then? If I >>> want the values from 1 to 2 with step size 0.01, I guess that writing >>> >>> 1.00 .. 2.00 >>> >>> won't be sufficient. Trying to work out the step size by looking at >>> the precision of things that are double or floats doesn't really >>> sound so feasible, since there are a lot of holes in the actual >>> representation, so 1.0001 may become 1.0, yielding very different >>> results. >> That is a general problem of floats. We tend to write them in decimal >> notation, but internally they use a representation which is binary. >> And it is absolutely not obvious what the "precision" of 1.0001 might be. >> There could be a data type like "LongDecimal" in Ruby or "BigDecimal" >> in Java, that actually has a knowlegde of its precision and whose >> numbers are fractions with a power of 10 as the denominator. But for >> floats I would only see the interval as reasonably clear. Even a step >> of 1 is coming with some problems, because an increment of 1 does not >> have any effect on floating point numbers like 1.03e300 or so. > Yes. Exactly my point. By the way, do we want to warn if someone writes > > 1e300 .. 1e301 :by(1) > > given that the number implementation yields 1e300 + 1 == 1e300? > > Regards, > > Michael. > > > > >
-- Sent from my mobile device Mark J. Reed <markjr...@gmail.com>
