IEEE 754
Edward Jason Riedy
ejr at lotus.CS.Berkeley.EDU
Mon Jul 24 19:09:30 EDT 2000
And John W. Baxter writes:
-
- You mean I may someday be able to put aside my answers to the "why
- doesn't 2/10 print as 0.2 as we all know it should?" sorts of questions?
I wish. IEEE 854 is a radix-independent FP standard. It could be
implemented for base-10 in hardware, but only some hand calculators
have done that. There are many libraries for BCD-style arithmetic,
but I don't know how good or fast they are. I don't understand all
the issues involved.
Way off-topic: Besides, not all numbers are natural for base-10.
One example is pi. It strongly appears that the only natural base
for pi is 16 (pi may be base-16 normal and not base-10 normal). Not
proven yet, but looking likely. See
http://www.nersc.gov/~dhbailey/dhbpapers/bcrandom.ps for some neat
pi results.
Back on topic: Python's answer is even more painful to explain:
> bash-2.03$ python -c 'print 2/10'
> 0
Jason
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