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I wish people were more willing to use rational numbers in programs. Rather than leaving something as 1/24, people almost always perform the division and wind u
by asudghionbio 9y ago
I wish people were more willing to use rational numbers in programs. Rather than leaving something as 1/24, people almost always perform the division and wind up with a float.
I've never seen rationals in a codebase. And that's a shame, because they do some things elegantly.
- dahart 9y agoI've had to use rationals for Project Euler. You could think of fixed point as a type of rational. ;) In computer graphics we sometimes use rational curves. It's not the same as rational numbers, but related.
- throwaway080383 9y agoI think the problem is that the numerator and denominator in reduced form can easily get pretty big, even if the magnitude of the number itself isn't all that big. E.g. in the rational number 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/24, the denominator already can't fit in a 32-bit int.
- wiml 9y agoYou can reasonably efficiently find the nearest rational number whose numerator and denominator fit in a given sized type. This means your rationals are imprecise, just like floats; the sparse subset of numbers they can represent exactly is different from floats' (and possibly more useful).