Gawk/Floating-point-summary
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16.8 Summary
- Most computer arithmetic is done using either integers or floating-point values. Standard
awk
uses double-precision floating-point values. - In the early 1990s Barbie mistakenly said, “Math class is tough!” Although math isn’t tough, floating-point arithmetic isn’t the same as pencil-and-paper math, and care must be taken:
- - Not all numbers can be represented exactly.
- - Comparing values should use a delta, instead of being done directly with ‘
==
’ and ‘!=
’. - - Errors accumulate.
- - Operations are not always truly associative or distributive.
- Increasing the accuracy can help, but it is not a panacea.
- Often, increasing the accuracy and then rounding to the desired number of digits produces reasonable results.
- Use
-M
(or--bignum
) to enable MPFR arithmetic. UsePREC
to set the precision in bits, andROUNDMODE
to set the IEEE 754 rounding mode. - With
-M
,gawk
performs arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic using the GMP library. This is faster and more space-efficient than using MPFR for the same calculations. - There are several areas with respect to floating-point numbers where
gawk
disagrees with the POSIX standard. It pays to be aware of them. - Overall, there is no need to be unduly suspicious about the results from floating-point arithmetic. The lesson to remember is that floating-point arithmetic is always more complex than arithmetic using pencil and paper. In order to take advantage of the power of floating-point arithmetic, you need to know its limitations and work within them. For most casual use of floating-point arithmetic, you will often get the expected result if you simply round the display of your final results to the correct number of significant decimal digits.
- As general advice, avoid presenting numerical data in a manner that implies better precision than is actually the case.
Previous: POSIX Floating Point Problems, Up: Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic [Contents][Index]