• Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    I’m not familiar with IEEE 754.

    Edit: I think this sort of space shouldn’t be the kind where people get downvoted for admitting ignorance honestly, but maybe that’s just me.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      It’s a wonderful world where 1 / 0 is ∞ and 1 / -0 is -∞, making a lot of high school teachers very very mad. OTOH it’s also a very strange world where x = y does not imply 1 / x = 1 / y. But it is, very emphatically, an algebra.

      Mostly it’s pure numerology, at least from the POV of most of the people using it.

    • Gobbel2000@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      IEEE 754 is the standard to which basically all computer systems implement floating point numbers. It specifically distinguishes between +0 and -0 among other weird quirks.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      You probably are familiar with the thing, just not under that name, and not as a subject of mathematical study. I am aware that there are, at least in theory, mathematicians never expanding beyond pen+paper (and that’s fine) but TBH they’re getting kinda rare. The last time you fired up Julia you probably used them, R, possibly, Coq, it’d actually be a surprise.

      They’re most widely known to trip up newbie programmers, causing excessive bug hunts and then a proud bug report stating “0.1 + 0.2 /= 0.3, that’s wrong”, to which the reply will be “nope, that’s exactly as the spec says”. The solution, to people who aren’t numerologists, is to sprinkle gratuitous amounts of epsilons everywhere.