nraynaud
Reputation: 5132
Does Java's floating point implementation still have the problems identified by Kahan?
I've read a few papers from Kahan tonight, and his famous rant against Java. Before I dive into the JVM spec, did anything change since the initial rant on this front? For example:
- setting rounding mode
- accessing the flags
- getting more precision for free
- ... ?
Thanks,
Nico.
Upvotes: 5
Views: 1623
Answers (1)
Peter Lawrey
Reputation: 533710
My guess is they are still valid as I have not seen much change in this area since '98.
However, I am not sure they would really be used much even if they were added today. Many languages support variable precision arithmetic (as does Java) which appears to be a better solution for this type of problem. e.g. BigInteger, BigDecimal.
Upvotes: 0
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