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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/gawk.texi')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/gawk.texi | 15 |
1 files changed, 14 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/doc/gawk.texi b/doc/gawk.texi index 46a962dd..7d463a3d 100644 --- a/doc/gawk.texi +++ b/doc/gawk.texi @@ -18696,6 +18696,15 @@ whereas others are only approximated. This is not a ``bug'' in @command{awk}, but simply an artifact of how computers represent numbers. +@quotation NOTE +It cannot be emphasized enough that the behavior just +described is fundamental to modern computers. You will +see this kind of thing happen in @emph{any} programming +language using hardware floating-point numbers. It is @emph{not} +a bug in @command{gawk}, nor is it something that can be ``just +fixed.'' +@end quotation + @cindex negative zero @cindex positive zero @cindex zero@comma{} negative vs.@: positive @@ -18908,7 +18917,11 @@ hardware floating-point (as used by standard @command{awk} and the default for @command{gawk}), and @dfn{arbitrary-precision} floating-point, which is software based. This @value{CHAPTER} aims to provide enough information to understand both, and then -will focus on @command{gawk}'s facilities for the latter. +will focus on @command{gawk}'s facilities for the latter.@footnote{If you +are interested in other tools that perform arbitrary precision arithmetic, +you may want to investigate the POSIX @command{bc} tool. See +@uref{http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/bc.html, +the POSIX specification for it}, for more information.} Binary floating-point representations and arithmetic are inexact. Simple values like 0.1 cannot be precisely represented using |