OpenEuphoria

RE: arithmetic

• Posted by irv at take.maxleft.com Jun 01, 2002
• 666 views

George Walters wrote:
> the inability of binary computers to accurately represent  base 10 
> numbers
> has been known since the beginning of computers, however, languages 
> (i.e.
> fortran, basic, cobol,and any language i've ever used) deals with it 
> where
> an equal (=) for normal arithmetic is useful.


George:

Fortran has exactly the same floating point errors as 
Euphoria, if you're comparing floating point numbers.
See http://www.lahey.com/float.htm

COBOL has the same problem, but COBOL programmers 
rarely use floating point, because COBOL has a 
decimal type. Which for all practical purposes is 
just integer math, with an imaginary decimal point 
inserted on display. You can do the same thing with 
Euphoria. See http://cobolreport.com/pp/part2.asp

As for Basic, I don't know, haven't used it in years, 
but I do see that BCD math packages are available 
as add-ons for Visual Basic, so I guess it can't handle 
decimal arithmetic either, without help. CBasic came 
with BCD math built-in, but it cost $4,000.

Borland's Turbo Pascal 3.0 offered a version with 
a built-in BCD type. Later versions dropped support for 
this. Guess it wasn't very popular.

Regards. 
Irv