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by TheRealPomax 2042 days ago
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.

1 comments

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