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Re^4: Determining the minimum representable increment/decrement possible?

by davido (Cardinal)
on Jun 15, 2016 at 19:36 UTC ( [id://1165784]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^3: Determining the minimum representable increment/decrement possible?
in thread Determining the minimum representable increment/decrement possible?

It would appear that in this case, 1.9041105342991887e+258 is not possible to store.

That is because 1.9041105342991887e+258 does not fit into m/2^n, and therefore cannot be represented precisely in base 2. You would need a couple more bits to push the rounding error further out, but that's just kicking the can down the road.

In other words, the binary representation of this floating point value results in a non-terminating sequence, much as 1/3rd results in a non-terminating sequence in base 10.


Dave

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Re^5: Determining the minimum representable increment/decrement possible?
by ExReg (Priest) on Jun 15, 2016 at 21:47 UTC

    Very true. But since perl is using double precision on my machine, you will never get that number. You would need quad precision to represent 1.9041105342991887e+258.

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