* José Colón <jec....@gmail.com> [180830 06:53]:
> Very interesting. So would it be a good idea to use these types of untyped 
> constant calculations for financial applications, or instances where one 
> would use the math.big package?

Not likely.  You would have to know at compile time the exact values you
wanted to calculate, so you might as well not even write the program!

If you are writing financial applications or other applications where
rounding and/or precision are important, you must have a much more
thorough understanding of how the computer stores floating point values,
how calculations are performed, how results are represented in the
precision available, and how (and why) those results differ from the
exact values.

Simply learning that Java and Python have rounding errors and that using
Go's untyped constants give you the "human expected" results for some
simple examples is woefully insufficient to write correct floating point
code when such details are important.

On the other hand, there is a wide variety of programs that use floating
point values that don't need to worry about the rounding error in the
least significant bits.

As an example, if you had a set of coordinates, stored as floating point
numbers, representing a graphical figure, it is highly probable that you
could translate and scale those coordinates for display on the screen
without worrying about, or having a deep understanding of, rounding
errors.

...Marvin

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