Numerics question: reading floating point constants

nicolas cellier ncellier at ifrance.com
Sun Apr 9 17:07:48 UTC 2006


Le Dimanche 09 Avril 2006 18:23, stéphane ducasse a écrit :
> 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:

Hi Stef,
all i know was taken from Sun workstations documentation that were not bad, 
but i have no more access to them.

Tony's ref does not seem bad too, but does not seem to deal with IEEE rounding 
mode, the algorithm rounds to nearest.

I do not know what printf/scanf do.
Documentation should exist for sure in the gnu project (gcc, glib, etc... all 
deal with this problem), but i have no direct link.

BTW, our nice computers are doing close to their best: most real numbers are 
simply not computable by an algorithm... Read this link taken from wikipedia 
http://turnbull.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Real_numbers_3.html

Nicolas




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