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Yeah, But the PR Fallout ...
A little embarrassing, though. Could you imagine if Microsoft decided to roll out their own Switch ads? That same music in the background, and some stoned teenager saying, "Yeah, and when my math teacher said that the answer to 37+37 wasn't wasn't 74.00000002, I realized ... I needed Windows." (Note: I hate M$ and have been a loyal Apple user for three years so far. But this *IS* a bit of a potential PR "d'oh!" for Apple.)
Yeah, But the PR Fallout ...
Back in the early 90's, Microsoft had a similar glitch with the calculator provided with Win 3.0 through Win 3.11. In these versions subtracting an integer such as "3" from a decimal like "3.1" would result in an answer of "0"
Yeah, But the PR Fallout ...
no, it doesn't carry through the extra digit; apparently it is just a display-only bug.
Yeah, But the PR Fallout ...
Since the number holds more digits of precision during calculations, it turns out that 0.07+0.07 is indeed 0.14, not 0.140000...02. Even if you use the memories, so as to actually be using the 0.0700000...01 values.
Indeed, if you program in floating point very often, you'll find that having those little errors like this are actually normal and *extremely* common. However when operations are done with them, things always work out. I don't know all the details of the whys and hows, but it has to do with the IEEE way in which floating point numbers are represented. Certain exact values are impossible to exactly represent (or something like that). I know that often times the results of calculations give things like 14.9999999999999 or 15.0000000000001. But I'm unsure of any of the details as to why. I'm just vague on this. (Anyone with exacting knowledge care to follow up on this for me?) Anyway, it is a tad embarrassing that they didn't write complete algorithms to display it as 0.07 instead of 0.0700000...01, but what users don't know (and can't tell), is that that extra algorithms are written to handle displaying the number the way we want to see it. Internally, the floating point variable is still holding the same value. -Jeff (I've written a few calculators in my time. :) ) |
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