G'day all. Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
That's one of the warning signs I watch out for. "Never compare floats for equality" is a sure sign of someone who thinks they know about floats but don't.
Quoting Roman Leshchinskiy
Hmm. Personally, I've never seen an algorithm where comparing for exact equality was algorithmically necessary.
One trick I've occasionally used is to avoid the need for a discriminated union of floating point and integer types by just using a floating point number. If you ignore bitwise operations and division/remainder, any integer operation that doesn't cause overflow on 32-bit integers will work just the same if you use IEEE-754 64-bit floating point numbers instead. That includes equality. Moreover, you even get a few more significant bits of precision. In these days of fast 64 and 128 bit words, it might not be entirely moral, but it works. Cheers, Andrew Bromage