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[bug-gawk] Error Gawk Manual FP Precision


From: ricky
Subject: [bug-gawk] Error Gawk Manual FP Precision
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2018 07:11:20 +0300
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.0

Dear bug-gawk:

The section on comparing two floating point values correctly recommends making avoiding simple equality comparisons in favor of ensuring the values are close enough.

The code given in 15.4.1.2 Be Careful Comparing Values is clearly wrong, though:

The general wisdom when comparing floating-point values is to see if they are within some small range of each other (called a delta, or tolerance). You have to decide how small a delta is important to you. Code to do this looks something like the following:

delta = 0.00001                 # for example
difference = abs(a) - abs(b)    # subtract the two values
if (difference < delta)
    # all ok
else
    # not ok

--------------------------------------------------------------

If the desired value, a is -1000, and b is +1000, the answer is off by 2000. But difference will be zero.


Thanks for all of your work,

   Ricky



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