Gary Wright wrote: [...]. > > > Many people don't realize that floating point literals written > in base 10 (such as 123.6) may not have an exact finite > representation when converted to base 2 Right. 0.6 in binary has a repeating decimal -- 0.1001 repeating or something like that. > and similarly a finite > base 2 floating point value may not have a finite representation > in base 10. [...] I think not. Every number of the form 1/(2^n) has a terminating decimal in base 10. Am I wrong? The problems, of course, arise with numbers like 1/3, which doesn't terminate in either base. This is what the Rational class is good for. > Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org marnen / marnen.org -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.