Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and it’s truly amazing

Re:Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and ... by asudghionbio on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @10:12AM (#16214154)

I wish people were more willing to use rational numbers in programs. Rather than leaving something as 1/24, people almost always perform the division and wind up with a float.

I've never seen rationals in a codebase. And that's a shame, because they do some things elegantly.

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Re:Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and ... by throwaway080383 on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @09:04PM (#16219751)

I think the problem is that the numerator and denominator in reduced form can easily get pretty big, even if the magnitude of the number itself isn't all that big. E.g. in the rational number

1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/24,

the denominator already can't fit in a 32-bit int.

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Re:Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and ... by wiml on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @03:36AM (#16221256)

You can reasonably efficiently find the nearest rational number whose numerator and denominator fit in a given sized type. This means your rationals are imprecise, just like floats; the sparse subset of numbers they can represent exactly is different from floats' (and possibly more useful).

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Re:Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and ... by dahart on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @11:41AM (#16214891)

I've had to use rationals for Project Euler.

You could think of fixed point as a type of rational. ;)

In computer graphics we sometimes use rational curves. It's not the same as rational numbers, but related.

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