24 Feb
2003
24 Feb
'03
4:31 a.m.
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Feldman, Robert wrote:
A real computer doesn't know what the square root
of negative one is? :-P
Thank you.
Last week, I was explaining to one of my classes the differences between
Floating Point and Real.
A REAL computer (if there were such - analog??) would have infinite
numbers between 1 and 2. A Floating Point system only has about 8
million, and doesn't have any odd numbers above about 16 million.
Double precision has substantially more, but still quite clearly
finite.