Numerics question: reading floating point constants

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sun Apr 9 16:23:23 UTC 2006


Do you know a good book or lectures on the problems related to number  
representation in our nice
computers?

Stef

On 9 avr. 06, at 18:18, nicolas cellier wrote:

> 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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