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From: Arne Vajhøj on 12 Jul 2010 22:00 On 09-07-2010 01:06, Kevin McMurtrie wrote: > In article<4c350cb7$0$282$14726298(a)news.sunsite.dk>, > Arne Vajh�j<arne(a)vajhoej.dk> wrote: >> On 07-07-2010 14:13, Lew wrote: >>> The reason that computer programmers command such good wages is that >>> it is a *skilled* profession. Most people cannot do it, and of those >>> who can it requires intelligence, study and practice, i.e., it >>> requires tremendous intellectual effort and capacity. >> >> Why can I hear violins in the background? >> >> :-) >> >>> It is one of the most fundamental and introductory aspects of computer >>> programming that floating-point "numbers" in a computer are limited- >>> precision approximations of real numbers. >> >> There are actually programmers that are never exposed to floating >> point. > > Paid programmers? Yes. > Computer science is knowing how information from the > real world can be represented within the constraints of a computer. > It's the basis for knowing what you're doing while programming. Floating point is not important at all in computer science. It is more the natural/social/medical sciences and engineering that uses computers that have to deal with them. And the question about how to represent information in a computer belongs to electrical engineering. Arne
From: Arved Sandstrom on 13 Jul 2010 05:39
Kevin McMurtrie wrote: > In article <4c350cb7$0$282$14726298(a)news.sunsite.dk>, > Arne Vajh�j <arne(a)vajhoej.dk> wrote: > >> On 07-07-2010 14:13, Lew wrote: >>> The reason that computer programmers command such good wages is that >>> it is a *skilled* profession. Most people cannot do it, and of those >>> who can it requires intelligence, study and practice, i.e., it >>> requires tremendous intellectual effort and capacity. >> Why can I hear violins in the background? >> >> :-) >> >>> It is one of the most fundamental and introductory aspects of computer >>> programming that floating-point "numbers" in a computer are limited- >>> precision approximations of real numbers. >> There are actually programmers that are never exposed to floating >> point. >> >> Arne > > Paid programmers? Computer science is knowing how information from the > real world can be represented within the constraints of a computer. > It's the basis for knowing what you're doing while programming. Not only are there programmers who literally never use floating point, but I'll wager that the huge majority of programmers who do use floating point (which latter group is probably the majority of programmers anyway) do _not_ understand the nuances. IOW, the majority of all programmers couldn't tell you the 3 parts of an IEEE 754 floating point representation if you held them up at gunpoint. Most programmers who use floating point - so, most programmers - get by without understanding the nuances. They hear one way or the other that money shouldn't be handled with floats or doubles, so without really understanding the details they use integer or fixed decimals instead, and don't get bit. Of those who do use floating point for problems other than money, not too many of them are doing scientific work, so the odds are that while their use of FP is uninformed, most of them will scrape by with just the occasional bug that simply disappears into the morass of hundreds of other bugs that their team has in their defect-reporting system anyway. We can bemoan this ignorance, but it's simply another category of ignorance that you can add to all the others that are possessed by average "programmers" today. AHS -- We�re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them. -- Lewis B. Puller, North Korea, 1950 |