Inaccurate definition for Right Division Operator? #57812
goualard-f
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that definition was probably written by someone who had recently taken an abstract algebra course but had not recently read the IEEE arithmetic spec |
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you're exactly right. The definition is conceptually motivated by algebra but does not faithfully describe the behavior of floating-point division. Your example shows this discrepancy well. |
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The documentation defines the Right Division Operator
/(x,y)
as the multiplication ofx
by the inverse ofy
on the right. Besides being strangely convoluted, I believe such a definition is also misleading. For floating-point values, the RightDivision Operator performs at most one rounding only, while the multiplication by the inverse might incur two roundings, leading to different results. Consider:Am I missing something here? What are the considerations that led to such a definition in the first place?
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