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As someone who never learned the "dreadful notation... discouraging legions of programmers", this was really helpful! The "canonical" equation doesn't mean any
by ryan-duve 5y ago
As someone who never learned the "dreadful notation... discouraging legions of programmers", this was really helpful! The "canonical" equation doesn't mean anything to me and the window/offset explanation does.
I'm sure the author intended to keep the article short, but I think it would benefit from more examples, including a number like 5e-5 or something. It isn't clear to me how the window/offset explains that.
Edit: to clarify, I do not understand how the floating point representation of 0.00005 is interpreted with windows/offsets.
- ricardobeat 5y ago5e-5 is not really related to FP, it’s just scientific notation. The number itself is still stored as shown in the post, it’s just being printed in a more compact form. The number after e is a power of 10: 5e2 = 5 * 10^2 = 5 * 100 = 500 5e-5 = 5 * 10^-5 = 5 / 100000 = 0.00005 Once you internalize this, you just read the exponent as “x zeroes to the left”.
- taeric 5y agoScientific notation is easily seen as just floating point in base ten, though. Had the same rules about leading 1 and such. Add in significant digits, and you have most all of the same concerns.
- boibombeiro 5y agoScientific notation IS a floating point.