CODEWITHSUNDEEP
data-structuresrational-numbers
Adam
Adam

Reputation: 365

Representing a fraction in binary?

I'm looking at binary data representations for fractions, and I was wondering what kind of a data structure the fraction would have if you were to store both the numerator and denominator that store a fraction. Is it just two separate numbers that have no relation but are combined when used in a calculation?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 336

Answers (1)

dtech
dtech

Reputation: 14060

If you want to store rational numbers without losing precision the correct way is to store both the numerator and denominator.

In practice most people use either floating-point math or built-in/library arbitrary-precision number data-types (e.g. Java's BigDecimal).

If you specifically want to use a data-type for fractions, some languages have built-in types for rational numbers. For most other languages there is usually a library with a usable datatype (e.g. for Java Apache Commons has a Fraction class and for C/C++ GMP has a mpq_t datatype)

Upvotes: 3

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