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Float rounding

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From:
perl5
Date:
August 17, 2023 12:45
Subject:
Float rounding
Message ID:
20230817144459.6d80becf@pc09
As mentioned on Amsterdam IRC by Johan (summarized):

 sciurius: 'printf "%.2f\n", -1.785;' prints "-1.78" for >= 5.30 and "-1.79" for <= 5.28

We (Johan, Abe and me) have done some test to check if this was a
correct statement and if so, what part of the toolchain were to blame.

I used my perl farm to conclude:

 -1.78 voor 5.6.0 … 5.8.0, -1.79 voor 5.8.1 … 5.29.1, -1.78 voor 5.29.2 … 5.38.1

Then I suggested that glibc/libm might be debet, but none of us could
find proof that the version of glibc had influence on this outcome.

I *know* that floats are imprecise, but I promised I'd forward this to
the ML.

Abe then did a bisect to hit the culprit being

 ce6f496d720f620645562842: PATCH: [perl #41202] text->float gives wrong answer

Again, *I* have no personal opinion or interest, but Rob and/or people
with knowledge in this area might have.

commit ce6f496d720f6206455628425320badd95b07372
Author: Sisyphus <sisyphus@cpan.org>
Date:   Wed Aug 1 22:33:38 2018 +1000

    PATCH: [perl #41202] text->float gives wrong answer

    This changes to use Perl_strtod() when available, and that turns out to
    be the key to fixing this bug.

    S_mulexp10() is removed from embed.fnc to avoid repeating the
    complicated prerequisites for defining Perl_strtod().  This works
    because this static function already was defined before use in
    numeric.c, and always called in full form without using a macro.

    James Keenan fixed a file permissions problem originally introduced by
    this commit, but the fix has been squashed into it.

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  https://tux.nl   Perl Monger   http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.37        porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and Linux
https://tux.nl/email.html http://qa.perl.org https://www.test-smoke.org
                           

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