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From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Floating Point Expectations
Keywords: Double Precision Floating Point
Message-ID: <1547@charon.cwi.nl>
Date: 25 May 90 21:35:40 GMT
References: <12977@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1990May24.132423.3080@eddie.mit.edu> <995@s8.Morgan.COM>
Sender: news@cwi.nl
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 19

In article <995@s8.Morgan.COM> amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt) writes:
 > Not so fast there!
Not so fast here!
 >                    There are still computers around with BCD (binary
 > coded decimal) floating point, both in hardware and software. There
 > are even machines which do not have an ordinary radix, such as the
 > Wang 'logarithmic' floating point representation. What you really
 > intend to say here is that that floating point numbers which are
 > rational fractions with denominators given by a power of the radix
 > may escape rounding. 
   ***

Very true.  The keyword here is may.  There is that infamous binary
machine where division or multiplication by two need not be exact.
Also there were (still are?) machines without representation for 0.0,
they had only plus or minus very small.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
dik@cwi.nl