On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:17 PM, damodar kulkarni <kdamodar2000@gmail.com> wrote:
Ok, let's say it is the effect of truncation. But then how do you explain this?

Prelude> sqrt 10.0 == 3.1622776601683795
True
Prelude> sqrt 10.0 == 3.1622776601683796
True

Because there's no reliable difference there. The truncation is in bits (machine's binary representation) NOT decimal digits. A difference of 1 in the final digit is probably within a bit that gets truncated.

I suggest you study IEEE floating point a bit. Also, study why computers do not generally store anything like full precision for real numbers. (Hint: you *cannot* store random real numbers in finite space. Only rationals are guaranteed to be storable in their full precision; irrationals require infinite space, unless you have a very clever representation that can store in terms of some operation like sin(x) or ln(x).)

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