infinity, nan, etc redundant, also exact decimal arithmetic
Subject: infinity, nan, etc redundant, also exact decimal arithmetic
From: Stavros Macrakis
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 10:12:28 -0400
On 9/4/06, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Also, I've written out some programs that do decimal arithmetic
> which is exact and closed under + and *, and has exact output.
That is nice, but why is it better than using rationals? After all,
it is a strict subset of the rationals. If it is nice to have
0.1+0.1=0.2, isn't even nicer to have 0.1+1/3 = 11/30? I suppose the
arithmetic is faster in decimal bigfloats, and output conversion is
simpler, but is that worth adding another data type?