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Demystifying Floating-Point Numbers
- jkyrlach 10y agoNope. Still mystified.
- gumby 10y agoA nice, clear explanation of the kind of thing that trips up most users of FP. IEEE 754 contains a plethora of corner cases but most normal humans never encounter them. There's enough hazard in the "simple" stuff.
- aisofteng 10y agoI am, like the author, consistently surprised at how few "programmers" understand this. Baffles me.
- biocomputation 10y agoMost people, including programmers, are not used to building numbers from numbers past basic arithmetic on digits from 0-9. Floating point numbers use scientific notation which is rarely used by anyone, even programmers. When was the last time you expressed a large-ish number in scientific notation when you were working on paper? Yeah, me either!