3 ms·

SBCL: * (+ (/ 1 10)(/ 2 10)) 3/10

• nneonneo 10y ago
  It's great that your language of choice has fraction support - but real-world engineering problems rarely involve simple rational fractions exclusively. At some point you're going to run into roundoff error. Plus, fractional computing has severe problems with expanding denominators, which grow very quickly with non-trivial operands. Although computers are fast, the overhead of dealing with hundred-digit-long arbitrary precision integers eventually makes rationals unwieldy.
  • pg314 10y ago
    It's a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Not all software deals with real-world engineering problems, and there are plenty of applications where you would prefer accuracy. I'd rather make that trade-off myself than have the language decide for me. Most of the time I would start with correctness and if speed is needed and the profiler shows that the bottleneck lies in fractional arithmetic, I'll switch to floating point numbers. A similar trade-off exists with bignums versus 32 or 64 bit integers. There again, I prefer a language that uses bignums by default. I'll convert the bottlenecks to use fixnums after I've verified that it is safe to do so.
  • Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
    With lisps you can chose whether you want floating point or rationals.