There is a paper titled “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic” by David Goldberg. It’s a bit theoretical, but IMO it’s a must-read for any programmer doing more than the occasional floating point calculation. It goes beyond just limited precision and rounding errors.
Jemapelle
More people need to learn to use Rational types. A pretty large majority of the numbers that people care about in real life can easily be represented by a ratio of integers, and they allow math with perfect precision.
Someone posted this article a while back that goes into more detail on some alternatives, as well as contains one of the best and most intuitive explanations of floating point that I’ve ever read.
Or just BigDecimal or an equivalent if rational types aren’t easy to use in your language (e.g if you’d have to literally enter the denominator and numerator).
Javascript: The result is “0.10.2”
Reject modernity, return to COBOL.
PHP: 0.3*
* with default precision
