News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Yet another alternative to floating-point numbers by choeger on Sunday November 01, 2020 @04:27AM (#24958285)
For starters, what happens to your numerical algorithm when it contains less-than comparisons? Intervals don't form an order.
Re:Yet another alternative to floating-point numbers by Smaug123 on Sunday November 01, 2020 @05:46AM (#24958593)
It's not a total (heh) disaster, since many intervals are comparable with many other intervals. Floating point implicitly "solves" this problem by truncating the implicit interval onto a member of a fixed discrete set. It does so quite cleverly, but ultimately it still silently loses information; sometimes (admittedly rarely) you might want the correct result "I was unable to compute an answer due to lack of input precision" that happens when you try and work out whether [0,2] is less than [1,3].
Re:Yet another alternative to floating-point numbers by dnautics on Sunday November 01, 2020 @10:19AM (#24960009)
Forget ordering. The useful equals relation becomes ternary.