[chrisseaton]

> Pedantic nitpick on floats: floats are exact.

I think you're meaning 'exact' as in they're deterministic. I don't know anyone who knows what they're talking about that argues against this, so I think you're not disagreeing with anyone.

Other people mean 'not exact' as in they can't represent all real numbers. Which is true.

[lukeschlather]

Integers can't represent all real numbers either. Integers can represent more decimal numbers, which tends to be what humans use. But that doesn't make integers more exact. It does mean that integers will probably more accurately reflect the precision of your inputs. (But that presumes that your inputs are entered by humans, and not floats coming out of a sensor that produces readings as floats.)

[TheRealPomax]

careful with your terminology there: integers are by definition not real numbers. All ints are reals, but only an infinitely small proportion of reals are ints.

If, however, you meant "the integer datatypes can't represent all integers", then you probably want to say that instead of mixing maths terminology. And you'll also have to back up that claim because bigintegers are as accurate as you have space to store them in; their limitation is not imposed by their spec, but by your hardware.

Unlike IEEE floating point decimal numbers, where the limitation is explicitly part of the spec itself. That limitation is literally why floats even work at all.

[lukeschlather]

Oh I thought thread was contrasting floats with fixnums, I was very confused and wrong.