Re: Floating point inaccuracies

[Andrew Lentvorski <bsder@...>]

On 11/28/10 1:28 PM, Patrick Rapin wrote:
> This sort of problems, not directly related to Lua but to the IEEE 754
> floating point standard, comes up regularly to the list.
> Wouldn't be possible to find a more generic solution?

1) Switch to Decimal Floating Point: http://speleotrove.com/decimal/

2) Cram Goldberg down the throat of everyone who asks:
"What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.6768

Is that generic enough? :-)


Oddly, Decimal Floating Point works very well on 32-bit embedded systems 
without floating point units (like ARM or MIPS).  A decimal floating 
point library is generally no slower (and often faster) than a 
corresponding binary floating point library and converting to/from text 
requires way less code, less working memory, less uncertainty and is 
generally faster to boot.

-a