3 ms·
> And for the record, since we're talking about hundred digit numbers, as an IEEE float that would mean 23 exponent bits and you'd have to go below 10e-4000000
by tialaramex 2y ago
> And for the record, since we're talking about hundred digit numbers, as an IEEE float that would mean 23 exponent bits and you'd have to go below 10e-4000000 before it rounds to zero. Or 32 exponents bits if you follow some previous software implementations.
Um, no. Have you confused your not-at-all hypothetical self? Are you mistaking the significand, aka the mantissa for an exponent? The significand in a 32-bit "single precision" IEEE float is 23 bits (with an implied leading 1 bit for normal values)
When I wrote that example I of course tried this, since it so happens that I have been testing some conversions recently so...
>> (e -1000)
f32: 0
f64: 0
real ~5.07595889754945676529180947957434e-435
- Dylan16807 2y agoPlease refer back to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070827 That's the first thing I said in this conversation. I did not ever suggest that single precision was enough. A hundred digits is beyond octuple precision. Octuple has 19 exponent bits, and in general every step up adds 4 more. And going further up the comment chain, the original version was your mention of computing 40 followed by hundreds of digits of precision.