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pronlast Wednesday at 11:13 AM1 replyview on HN

I'm not sure how a "spec with floats" differs from a spec with networks, RAM, 64-bit integers, multi-level cache, or any computing concept, none of which exists as a primitive in mathematics. A floating point number is a pair of integers, or sometimes we think about it as a real number plus some error, and TLAPS can check theorems about specifications that describe floating-point operations.

Of course, things can become more involved if you want to account for overflow, but overflow can get complicated even with integers.


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hwaynelast Wednesday at 9:22 PM

Those things, unlike floats, have approximable-enough facsimiles that you can verify instead. No tools support even fixed point decimals.

This has burned me before when I e.g needed to take the mean of a sequence.

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