Hacker News Reader

Zero shouldn't be an exception there. If f had been set from something like f = a - b, then you're in the same situation where f might be almost but not exactly zero.

The linter wouldn't know where f came from, so it should flag all floating point equality cases, and have some way that you can annotate it for "yeah this one is okay."

View on HN

The thing is that

if (f == 0.0) means "is f exactly zero so it's not initialized" 99 times for every one time it means "is f zero-ish because of a cancellation/degeneracy/whatever"

I just found that I have now annotated it for "yeah this one is ok" about 100 times, and caught zero cases where I meant to do a comparison to zero-or-very-nearly-so but accidentally wrote == 0.0.

So my conclusion is: I would have had less noise in my code with that exception in the linter, and the linter had been equally useful.

The idea is not to do it with values derived from arithmetic, but e.g. from measurements where a real zero is very unlikely and indicates something different.

Right, but that's not something a linter could know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com