News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on 9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0. Parent comment

Re:9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0 by ummonk on Saturday January 05, 2019 @05:56PM (#18834870)
Well, you don't need to represent all the real numbers. You can get quite far with just rationals or algebraic numbers, although you'll have trouble with exponentials and trignometry. And computable numbers are basically superior to any other number system for computation.

You of course need an unbounded but finite amount of space to store these numbers, which is perfectly fine.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0 by dnautics on Saturday January 05, 2019 @06:08PM (#18834939)
> And computable numbers are basically superior to any other number system for computation.

I don't think that's really quite true. The point of FP is that you don't get any wierd statefulness in your compute complexity as values accumulate, every operation basically has O(1) compute time where N is the number of previous operations you've done. For rationals and algebraics that isn't the case.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0 by ori_b on Saturday January 05, 2019 @06:31PM (#18835092)
You'll have massive performance issues the second you end up with a relatively prime numerator or denominator that ends up in an iterative algorithm.
[ Parent | on HN ]