Hi all, Please excuse me for getting a bit off-topic, but I would like to point out that except for bean-counters who need to be bug-compatible with accounting standards, decimal floating point is generally a bad idea.
That is because the worst-case bound on the rounding error grows linear with the base size. So you really want to choose a base size as small as possible, i.e., 2. This is not really related to the fact that computers use base-2 arithmetic, that is just a happy coincidence. If we used ternary logic for our computers, FP should still be based on base-2 and computer architects would complain about the costly multiplication and division with powers of two (just as they have historically complained about the costly implementation of denormals, but we still got that, mostly thanks to prof. Kahan convincing Intel). Worse, a base other than 2 also increases the spread in the average rounding error. This phenomenon is called "wobble" and adds additional noise into calculations. The ultimate problem is that the real number line contains quite a few more elements than our puny computers can handle. There is no 100% solution for this, but of all the possible compromises, floating-point forms a fairly optimum point in the design space for a wide range of applications. Stephan Op 20 okt. 2017 3:13 p.m. schreef "Victor Stinner" <victor.stin...@gmail.com >: Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
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