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.
Comment on near zero
Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month agoI’m not familiar with IEEE 754.
Gobbel2000@programming.dev 1 month ago
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month 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.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month 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.
Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
I’ll need to look at it more; it sounds interesting.