alt Hacker NewsYeah, I'm not sure how widespread the knowledge is that floating point trades precision for magnitude. Its obvious if you know the implementation, but I'm not sure most folks do.
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MarkusQ • yesterday at 2:06 PM
Always remember https://m.xkcd.com/2501/
I remember having convincing a few coworkers that the number of distinct floating point values between 0.0 and 1.0 is the same as the number of values between 1.0 and infinity. They must not be teaching this properly anymore. Are there no longer courses that explain the basics of floating point representation?
I was arguing that we could squeeze a tiny bit more precision out of our angle types by storing angles in radians (range: -π to π) instead of degrees (range: -180 to 180) because when storing as degrees, we were wasting a ton of floating point precision on angles between -1° and 1°.