On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Intransition <transfire / gmail.com> wrote:
> So they can drop a billion transistors on a chip, have implemented 3D
> pipelines and video codec optimizations in hardware, but no one ever thought
> thay maybe it would be a good idea to support accurate base-10 math on the
> die?

Floating point math with binary representation of numbers is more
efficient than with decimal because you need less bits for
representing the same number.  And there is a standard for floating
point arithmetic which clearly defines how it must be done (i.e. base
2):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_number#IEEE_754:_floating_point_in_modern_computers

So BigDecimal is always the special case while the standard is binary.
 It's good that Ruby does not digress from this standard because if it
would do this could have dramatic effects (on performance for
example).

Kind regards

robert


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