What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

-brazil- writes "Every programmer forum gets a steady stream of novice questions about numbers not 'adding up.' Apart from repetitive explanations, SOP is to link to a paper by David Goldberg which, while very thorough, is not very accessible for novices. To alleviate this, I wrote The Floating-Point Guide, as a floating-point equivalent to Joel Spolsky's excellent introduction to Unicode. In doing so, I learned quite a few things about the intricacies of the IEEE 754 standard, and just how difficult it is to compare floating-point numbers using an epsilon. If you find any errors or omissions, you can suggest corrections."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F05%2F02%2F1427214%2FWhat-Every-Programmer-Should-Know-About-Floating-Point-Arithmetic" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=What+Every+Programmer+Should+Know+Abou t+Floating-Point+Arithmetic%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FaXzj1N" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/05/02/1427214/What-Every-Programmer-Should-Know-About-Floating-Point-Arithmetic?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Dxo5lWJXtDNig5Au_-QUFISSpnY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Dxo5lWJXtDNig5Au_-QUFISSpnY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Dxo5lWJXtDNig5Au_-QUFISSpnY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Dxo5lWJXtDNig5Au_-QUFISSpnY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/LdJlH4NcNtI" height="1" width="1"/

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