This thread is very similar to what you can find if you do a Web search for how to handle financial calculations. From my perspective, and like all matters in programming, the answer is "it depends". It depends on your goals; do you want the highest performance, the highest precision, comply with regulations, code readability / maintainability? It all depends. Languages like Java and Python have their pre-built packages that make infinite precision calculations easy for the programmer, but at a performance penalty. My original question regarding Go floats, later learning that the behavior is not of floats but of untyped constants, makes me wonder if a package that could provide similar ease of use in performing infinite precision calculations would be a good idea to have in Go's standard library (like Java's BigDecimal or Python's decimal module). Or then again, maybe this is already provided by the math/big package?
On Wednesday, August 29, 2018 at 10:33:16 PM UTC-4, José Colón wrote: > > I read that a common way to demonstrate that floating point numbers suffer > from approximation problems is by calculating this: > > 0.3 - 0.1 * 3 > > which should produce 0 but in Java, Python, and Javascript for example, > they produce -5.551115123125783e-17 . > > Surprisingly (or not, ;) ), Go produces the correct 0 result! I wonder why > is this so? Is it some higher precision being used versus these other > languages? Or is it some extra correcting logic behind the scenes? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
