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Comment by martin-adams | Hacker News Reader

I got hit by JavaScript rounding on a project once. Funny thing is, IE8 was okay with it and Chrome was the one that caused issues.

Turns out that 1000000 * 8.2 = 8199999.999999999

Sometimes we learn the hard way. The bug was getting written into an XML document and pushed to an embedded device over HTTP which was expecting an int and caused the device to crash. We fixed both bugs.

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    // Scheme
    (print (* 1000000 8.2))
    > 8199999.999999999

    // Python
    >>> 1000000 * 8.2
    8199999.999999999

    //PHP
    > 1000000 * 8.2
    > 8199999.999999999

    # Ruby 1.8.7
    1.8.7 :022 > 1000000 * 8.2
     => 8200000.0 

    # Ruby 1.9.2
    1.9.2p320 :001 > 1000000 * 8.2
     => 8199999.999999999

C/C++:

   printf("%lf\n", 1000000 * 8.2);
   8200000.000000

Here, printf() is doing the necessary rounding to hide the fact that 8.2 isn't exactly representable. It's interesting that other languages don't do something similar when outputting a float to text.

They do, you just have to request it:

    //Python
    >>> repr(1000000 * 8.2)
    '8199999.999999999'
    >>> "%lf" % (1000000 * 8.2)
    '8200000.000000'

I can't reproduce the PHP example:

  $ uname -p
  x86_64
  $ php -v
  PHP 5.4.6-1ubuntu1 (cli) (built: Aug 22 2012 21:13:52)
  Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
  Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies
  $ php -r 'var_dump(1000000 * 8.2);'
  float(8200000)
  $

My fault, I think I copied from the wrong REPL.

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