alt Hacker News> 0.1 just isn't an actual number.
A finitist computer scientists only accepts those numbers as real that can be expressed exactly in finite base-two floating point?
Replies
1718627440 • yesterday at 3:56 PM
That's essentially what you already do for integer arithmetic.
Yes. A computer scientist should know how numbers are represented and not expect non-representable numbers in that format to be representable.
0.1 is just as non-representable in floating point as is pi as is 100^100 in a 32 bit integer.
Terminating dyadic rationals (up to limits based on float size) are the representable values.