"Floats are terrifying. Maybe not as terrifying as unicode, but pretty darn terrifying." Good. At least someone else than Schneier realizes Unicode is a major

"Floats are terrifying. Maybe not as terrifying as unicode, but pretty darn terrifying." Good. At least someone else than Schneier realizes Unicode is a major PITA from a correctness and security point of view. Schneier said it best: "Unicode is too complex to ever be secure". Back to floats. It's nearly always a mistake to be using floats unless you're working on scientific computation (and 3D and game physics a are a kind of scientific computation). If you don't know how to compute error propagation: floats aren't for you. There. As simple as that. It's interesting to realize that most comments here do not adress that fundamental issue: it's not a particular bug in fp that's the problem. It's the overuse of fp itself that is the problem. I can give you one the simple example of a f^cktarded use of floats: in a gigantic spec (HTML) someone decided there would be a probability expressed as a number between 0 and 1 with up to three decimal points. This is totally f^cktarded and lots of people complained that it was a retarded thing to do. You should express this as a number between 0 and 999. Why? Because you know that otherwise clueless programmers are going to make mistakes while using floating point numbers where they shouldn't. And surely some programmers did. Some clueless monkeys in the Tomcat codebases decided it was a good idea to parse a number which was know to have at most three digits after the dot using... Java's built-in floating point parsing number library. That's silly of course: when a f^cktarded spec talks about a number between 0.000 and 0.999 you parse it manually into integers and do integers maths but I digress. So what did happen? Some people realized they could throw Java's floating-point parsing number library into an infinite loop and that's it: the most deadly Java remote DoS exploit to attack website. By faking one browser request you could throw one thread on a webapp server in an infinite loop. Rinse and repeat and a single machine could DoS an entire server farm. Due to stupid programmers using floating-point numbers when they shouldn't. The problem is exacerbated by clueless people everywhere thinking floating-point numbers are a good idea. They're not. They should die a horrible days and the days where CPU didn't have floating-point numbers were arguably better days for 99.999% of what should our use. Thankfully there's one area were even f^cktarded monkeys aren't using floating-point numbers: cryptography. I'd say that unless you can write Goldberg's "What every computer scientist should know about floating-point numbers" then you shouldn't be using floating-point numbers. As simple as that.