Thank you very much, Duncan! Now it is totally clear for me. Reading the 'R
inferno' tract suggested to me in private by a user (nut one can google it),
and wondering about heaven and hell....

Best regards, Z

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch@stats.uwo.ca>wrote:
I'm glad you are happy with your solution.  Just one inline comment below,
expanding on my private reply to you:
No, that's not how standard floating point representations work.  12.34 is
represented as a finite precision binary number between 1 and 2 (starting
out as 1.10001 in binary notation) multiplied by 2^3.  The problem is that
there is no way to represent it exactly in this format.  Only fractions with
a power of 2 in the denominator can be represented that way, and 12.34 is
not one of those.  It's 1234/100, and 100 is not a power of 2.

Duncan Murdoch

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


