Numerics question: reading floating point constants

nicolas cellier ncellier at ifrance.com
Sun Apr 9 16:18:16 UTC 2006


1 point for Andres, conversion from base 10 to base 2 is inexact.

1 point for Boris : successive inexact operations are not only costly, they 
can degrade accuracy.

I wonder if the conversion shouldn't be made with respect to IEEE rounding 
mode, and if i remember, this rounding mode is a parameter of underlying 
hardware.

In the past, i tried several algo. and finally, i lazily decided to use a call 
to sprintf/sscan from within VW.
But with a good reference such as Tony's (1 point) we should make it in 
Smalltalk.

Nicolas




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