Re: surprising precision

[Toon Moene <toon at moene dot org>]

Bob Plantz wrote:

> By the way, it may interest you to know that half the floating point 
> values (in IEEE 754 format) are in the range -2.0 to +2.0, not inclusive.

By far the best question in the programming course of the University I 
attended (years before IEEE 754):

On <this machine> integers are represented as sign magnitude 32 bit numbers.

Floating point numbers on that machine are specified according to the 
following 32 bit format <follows description of format>.

Question:

Are there

A. More floating point numbers than integer numbers.
B. More integer numbers than floating point numbers.
C. An equal number of both.

[ The only better question in a course I ever encountered was during an
  introductory in Climate Research at my Institute (KNMI):

  1. Define the average temperature on Earth.
  2. Describe how you would set up a measurement campaign to show
     that the average is changing.

]

A hint not given in that course: "The operative word is 'measurement'".

--
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
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