On Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:30:00 -0500, David Fontaine wrote:
>"Peter J. Holzer" wrote:
>
>> Right. Especially make it clear that floating point numbers are binary
>> and cannot exactly represent fractions which are not a multiple of some
>> power of two. 1/2, 3/4, 356/1024 can be exactly represented, but 1/10
>> cannot (just like 1/3 cannot be exactly represented in decimal).
>> Therefore 10 * 0.1 is not equal to 1.
>
>Except on TI's where they're in BCD ;)

You have POVray running on a TI? Looks like I have to port it to the
HP48 then (which also uses BCD) :-)

Seriously, apart from pocket calculators I don't know any current
computers which use a decimal representation of fp numbers. I won't
protest if the manual says "On most computers, floating point
numbers are binary", but I would be very surprised if anybody runs
povray on a computer with non-binary floats, even just for amusement
value.

	hp

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