Re:Floating Point Visually Explained (2017)
by _jsdw on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @01:59PM
(#19088520)
Personally, I might be able to convert a number to floating point using the formula, but it's not easy to grasp why. The visual explanation really helps with that.
Being able to read maths doesn't automatically mean that it is the best way to present an explanation of something.
Re:Floating Point Visually Explained (2017)
by jankins on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @09:15AM
(#19095173)
Any mathematical instruction I have found helpful has had a big emphasis on building “intuition“. This post was the first explanation I encountered that explained floating point encoding in a way that was immediately relatable and understandable to me. There are multiple ways to describe a thing, different people have different relationships to a thing which may make some descriptions more well-suited than others, and different people have different goals.
The hard part of floating point isn't the representation of numbers, it's how to perform arithmetic with rounding/truncation in the specified way (and why the specified way is preferred). The blog post doesn't touch on that at all.