Re: Really strange problem, for very bright people

Hi,

At August 9, 2003, 00:23, George J Belland wrote:

> The reason is probably the rounding errors incurred during processing differ when the
> order of the values changes. 

Actually, in this case, it's a rounding problem.  Floating-point
values are never guaranteed to be exact, and are considered
approximate numerics.  When doing floating-point arithmetics, the
CPU's rounding function is never called, unless specifically asked
for.

In regards to the rounding errors that you refer to, the CPU uses
banker's rounding as per IEEE standard, and banker's rounding round
the number to the closest even number. But, it also depends if there's
a specific rounding technique that is used by the spreadsheet, and
that rounding technique might not be banker's rounding, as per your
example. I'm pretty sure, that if you would perform the same
calculations in Delphi, you probably would get different results,
since Delphi uses the CPU's rounding function.

Just some food for thought.

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Rail
 Senior System Engineer
 ACCRA Group Inc. (www.accra.ca)
 ACCRA Med Software Inc. (www.filopto.com)


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