this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
428 points (96.5% liked)
Programmer Humor
19207 readers
1527 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What you're talking about isn't floating point, it's fixed point.
Wrong. Sounds like you think only fixed point/precision could be implemented in decimal. There's nothing about floating point that would make it impossible to implement in decimal. In fact, it's a common form of floating point. See C# "decimal" type docs.
The beginning of the Wikipedia article on floating point also says this: "In practice, most floating-point systems use base two, though base ten (decimal floating point) is also common." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_arithmetic) Also check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point
Everything in my comment applies to floating point. Not fixed point.
I generally interpret "decimal" to mean "real numbers" in the context of computer science rather than "base 10 numbers". But yes, of course you can implement floating point in base 10, that's what scientific notation is!