3 ms·
That’s garbage. If I input a number in to a spreadsheet I expect that number to stay exactly as-is. That a Excel could introduce bugs due to doing floats behin
by joshspankit 4y ago
That’s garbage. If I input a number in to a spreadsheet I expect that number to stay exactly as-is.
That a Excel could introduce bugs due to doing floats behind the scenes.... Completely unacceptable.
- trelane 4y agomust be new here .. :)
- joshspankit 4y agoHahahaha I appreciate that comeback. Well played.
- Someone 4y agoMost programming languages don’t behave that way, either. Why would we have to hold Excel to higher standards? Now, that Excel stores binary floats, but tries to pretend to use decimal ones, that’s something I think we can blame it for. From section 2 of https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf: Some parentheses in Microsoft’s Excel 2000 spreadsheet possess uncanny powers: Values Excel 2000 Displays for Several Expressions Expression 1.23456789012345000E+00 <– Entered to help count digits V = 4/3 displays… 1.33333333333333000E+00 Does Excel carry 15 sig. dec.? W=V- 1 3.33333333333333000E-01 Whence comes the 15th 3 ? X = W*3 1.00000000000000000E+00 Where went all 15 of the 9s ? Y=X- 1 0.00000000000000000E+00 They all went away ! Z = Y*2^52 0.00000000000000000E+00 Really all gone. (4/3 - 1)*3 - 1 0.00000000000000000E+00 Yes, gone. ((4/3 - 1)*3 - 1) -2.22044604925031000E-16 (But not ENTIRELY gone !) ((4/3 - 1)*3 - 1)*2^52 -1.00000000000000000E+00 Excel’s arithmetic is weird.
- joshspankit 4y ago> Why would we have to hold Excel to higher standards? Because one of it’s main uses is for doing calculations with money?