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Comment by an1sotropy

I first learned about "leaky abstractions" from John Cook, who describes* IEEE 754 floats as a leaky abstraction of the reals. I think this is a good way of appreciating floating point for the large group of people who's experience is somewhere between numerical computing experts (who look at every arithmetic operation through the lens of numerical precision) and total beginners (who haven't yet recognized that there can't be a one-to-one correspondence between a point on the real number line and a "float").

* https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/04/06/numbers-are-a-leak...

parent an1sotropy 2 years ago

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