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Re: why 0.1+0.2-0.3~=0

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On 13/03/2012 7:56 PM, Dirk Laurie wrote:
Because 0.1 is not exactly 1/10, 0.2 is not exactly 2/10,
0.3 is not exactly 3/10. Those "not exactly" terms
sometimes cancel out but usually do not. You can
can see it if you print out more than 16 digits.
> print(string.format("%.17f",0.1))
0.10000000000000001
> print(string.format("%.17f",0.2))
0.20000000000000001
> print(string.format("%.17f",0.3))
0.29999999999999999
Beyond the issue of finite floating point precision, there is also the non-trivaial issue of converting losslessly between strings and floats.
Out of curiosity, how does Lua perform its float<->string conversions?
I would have expected a conversion from "0.1" to double and back to string to be lossless, even when printing extra digits. I admit a large degree of ignorance here, but I have read the papers cited below. Does Lua depend on (often poor) native sprintf implementations? or does it use some variant of David Gay's fp routines?
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=93557
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989431
http://netlib.sandia.gov/fp/
Ross.

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