Re:What I didn’t know about Ruby Numbers
by recursive on Thursday November 19, 2020 @10:11AM
(#25150282)
If that's your criteria, then neither are BigDecimals exact real numbers.
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Re:What I didn’t know about Ruby Numbers
by ivanbakel on Thursday November 19, 2020 @10:50AM
(#25150686)
That's certainly true. The rationals (of which BigDecimal cannot represent the whole space) are a 0-measure part of the reals. I would not claim that BigDecimal is an exact representation, which is a fact that should be clear to anyone that tries to calculate 2 * PI in arbitrary-precision finite decimals. Even not considering irrational numbers, BigDecimal cannot handle 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1 correctly.
It might be fair to claim that floats are more inexact - certainly moreso than Rational, but probably moreso than BigDecimal for the numbers that programmers tend to care about.