Floating-point arithmetic is considered an esoteric subject by many people. This is rather surprising because floating-point is ubiquitous in computer systems. Almost every language has a floating-point datatype; computers from PCs to supercomputers have floating-point accelerators; most compilers will be called upon to compile floating-point algorithms from time to time; and virtually every operating system must respond to floating-point exceptions such as overflow. This paper presents a tutorial on those aspects of floating-point that have a direct impact on designers of computer systems.
I recently went through some stress when I made the mistake of using floating point numbers to represent DonationCredits on this website. -mouser (August 14, 2006, 03:43 AM)
...do we ever stop to think what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really trust it?I hate to cast aspersions on its good name but when I hear stories of space craft crashing, inconsistent information on bank statements and pensioners being short changed (...), I start to realise that there is a real danger of misusing floating point numbers...-http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/08/12/floating_point_approximation/
IIUC, in current versions of JavaScript the only kinds of numbers there are are IEEE 754...-ewemoa (January 27, 2012, 04:22 AM)