The REAL definition of "REAL" (was: Trivia Question

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Feb 24 12:31:00 2003

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Feldman, Robert wrote:
> A real computer doesn't know what the square root of negative one is? :-P

Thank you.
Last week, I was explaining to one of my classes the differences between
Floating Point and Real.

A REAL computer (if there were such - analog??) would have infinite
numbers between 1 and 2. A Floating Point system only has about 8
million, and doesn't have any odd numbers above about 16 million.
Double precision has substantially more, but still quite clearly
finite.
Received on Mon Feb 24 2003 - 12:31:00 GMT