On Wednesday 12 May 2004 12:50, Guillaume Marcais wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 15:35, Hal Fulton wrote:
> > Mohammad Khan wrote:
> > > I guess, you guys are missing the point,
> > >
> > > in real life you can't have exact answer of 1/3 + 2.3 + 1.3
> > > but you can have exact answer of 625.91 + 900.00 + 22.00
> >
> > Only if you build a computer that works in decimal. In binary,
> > 625.91 is as inexact as 1/3 is in decimal.
>
> Well, my HP48 calculator's processor is able to do math in binary or
> decimal. The real numbers are stored in memory in decimal and the
> operations by default made in decimal. It doesn't make my calculations
> any more precise, but it made (some of) the rounding errors less
> suprising.

Sort of makes me wonder if someone somewhere doesn't make a replacement FPU 
that does all of its calculations as real decimal values, or at least 
automatically corrects rounding errors.

	Sean O'Dell