4 ms·

I'm sure there's some subtlety I'm missing, but isn't it actually the same trade-off? A 64-bit float can only represent 52-bit integers exactly. Anything abov

I'm sure there's some subtlety I'm missing, but isn't it actually the same trade-off? A 64-bit float can only represent 52-bit integers exactly. Anything above that, and you don't even have integer-level precision on the number anymore... This sliding scale of precision is exactly why floats are terrible at the kinds of operations that would cause you to use a rational instead.

leetcrew 7y ago
> I'm sure there's some subtlety I'm missing, but isn't it actually the same trade-off? not exactly, unless you consider space efficiency to be an aspect of performance (which is certainly reasonable). a naive implementation of rationals using two int32_t's only covers the range of a single int32_t, despite using as many bits as the double. it's also a trade-off between range and consistent precision, of course. this certainly isn't some deep insight into number representation, just a quick point for the benefit of people who haven't thought much about rational data types before.