[Tutor] is this a bug? [Research papers on floating point]

[Danny Yoo]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Gregor Lingl wrote:

> 
> I understand; Remco braught it to the point:
> 
> > The problem is that, when converted to binary, 66.6 is repeating. There is
> > no way to represent it exactly in a finite amount of binary digits.
> >
> 
> It depends on the number beeing a repeating binary, not a repeating decimal


Hmmmm!  I did a quick search on Google, and found an interesting paper on
this topic:

How to Read Floating Point Numbers Accurately:

    http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/william90how.html


The math does seem a bit intimidating at first; I'd have to really study
it to understand it.  Still, perhaps it might interest someone on Tutor
who's interested in floating-point representation issues.


The rest of the web site:

    http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/directory.html

looks incredibly cool for anyone with a appetite for CS research papers;
this site appear to archive lots of good papers on computer science!