Why do we use R rather than Excel?

Re:Why do we use R rather than Excel? by belter on Sunday July 11, 2021 @10:46AM (#27801242)

But you also have issues like 'Catastrophic cancellation':

https://carolomeetsbarolo.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/catastrop...

Or:

"OOPS XL Did It Again"

https://carolomeetsbarolo.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/oops-xl-d...

From the Wikipedia article:

"Although Excel can display 30 decimal places, its precision for a specified number is confined to 15 significant figures, and calculations may have an accuracy that is even less due to five issues: round off,truncation, and binary storage, accumulation of the deviations of the operands in calculations, and worst: cancellation at subtractions resp. 'Catastrophic cancellation' at subtraction of values with similar magnitude."

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Re:Why do we use R rather than Excel? by FabHK on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @09:55AM (#27833019)

That's an issue inherent in floating point computations with fixed precision (such as IEEE 754).

  julia> 1e20 + 1000 - 1e20
  0.0

  julia> 1e20 + 10000 - 1e20
  16384.0

  Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 28 2021, 19:24:41) 
  >>> 1e20 + 1000 - 1e20
  0.0
  >>> 1e20 + 10000 - 1e20
  16384.0

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