Floating Point Approximations.

Here's another example of floating point errors, that's even simpler than the 21200 plus 2.5% example.

int i;
float x = 0;
for (i = 1; i < 100; ++i)

    x += 0.01;
x -= 1;
printf (x);

I apologize if I copied the code wrong. The idea is to start with zero, add one hundredth a hundred times, and subtract one. The answer is not quite zero.

Many environments will give a small error. This is such a trivial example that it should make all programmers shudder about using floats, unless they really know what they are doing. Received on Wed Mar 28 2007 - 09:28:00 CDT