FAQ: Difference between revisions

33 bytes removed ,  20 September 2012
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Like death and taxes, rounding errors are a fact of life. You cannot avoid them. You can only move a rounding error from one part of a computation to another, or you can use more precision and delay the rounding error. One way to delay the rounding error is to use arbitrary precision arithmetic, which is inevitably slower as it has to be implemented in software instead of hardware. You may use the vpa function from the symbolic package for this purpose.
Like death and taxes, rounding errors are a fact of life. You cannot avoid them. You can only move a rounding error from one part of a computation to another, or you can use more precision and delay the rounding error. One way to delay the rounding error is to use arbitrary precision arithmetic, which is inevitably slower as it has to be implemented in software instead of hardware. You may use the vpa function from the symbolic package for this purpose.


To learn more about floating point arithmetic, consult [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_arithmetic its Wikipedia article] or the classical reference [http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic].
To learn more about floating point arithmetic, consult [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_arithmetic its Wikipedia article] or the classical reference [http://floating-point-gui.de/ What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic].


=Porting programs from Matlab to Octave=
=Porting programs from Matlab to Octave=