• h3ndrik@feddit.de
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    9 months ago

    I think it’s equal zero in this case. I’d have to look up the IEEE specification to make sure. AFAIK it’s just not guaranteed for any numbers and depends on the floating point implementation. A general rule of thumb for programmers is not to use ‘equal’ with floating point numbers.

    • Turun@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      The example is wrong, because they used 1.0.

      But in general x-x does not have to equal 0, that is true. I’m pretty sure Nan and infinity would yield not 0.0, but Nan instead.

      And if you reach x with two different calculations, e.g. x1 = a - b - c and x2 = a - c - b it is certainly not guaranteed that x1 - x2 == 0.0

      • mokus
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        9 months ago

        This is correct. Additionally, if x is NaN, then x ≠ x.