Thanks to Ulf & Jeff .The link that was posted is too volumous.Do you know of any place wherin I can get the basics explained in a simple way.Anyway is there a way by which we can ascertain that the aritmetic will be different as in the above case? Regs Rajesh
In floating point arithmetic, most decimals are rounded - simply because it is impossible to define it in binary. Where arithmetic has problems with 1/3, floating point arithmetic has problems with many other numbers as well, like 1/10. In binary, this leads to a repetition similar to 1/3 or 1/9.
Therefore, in any programming language, floating point comparison should be one by checking if the difference is small enough: Where EPSILON is a very small value - the smaller EPSILON is, the smaller the fault in comparison. Ideally EPSILON would of course be 0.0, meaning f1 == f2, but as you've just read - you can't rely on that comparison.
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