Why are floating point values so prolific?
- by Kibbee
So, title says it all. Why are floating point values so prolific in computer programming. Due to problems like rounding errors, and not being able to even accurately represent numbers such as 0.1, I really can't see how they got as far as they did.
I understand that the computation is faster with floating point numbers, however, I can think of only a few cases that they actually the right data type would be using. If you sat back and think about every time you used a floating point value, how many times did you say, well, some error would be ok, as long as the result was a few microseconds faster.
It really makes me think because Jeff was talking about NP completeness, and how heuristics give an answer that is kind of right. And well, computers shouldn't do that. They should give you the answer that is correct. Yet we see floating point values used in many applications where they are completely not valid.
What really bugs me, isn't that floating point exists, but that in many languages, there isn't even a viable alternative, non-floating point, decimal value. A lot of programmers when doing financial applications have to fall back to storing the number of cents in an integer field. Which brings with it all kinds of other problems.
Why do floats continue to be so prolific, even though they can't represent the real answer, and we expect computers to be accurate?
[EDIT]
Just to clarify, I was talking about Base 2 floating points, and not base 10 floating points. .Net offers the Decimal data type, which is a base 10 floating point value which offers a much better representation of the numbers we deal with on a daily basis in most computer programs. I find it hard to believe that even modern languages like Java don't support base 10 floating point values, unless you want to move into the realm of things like BigDecimal, which isn't really the right answer either in a lot of situations.
