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# Safely eating potatoeses

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You can represent any integer in the range [-2^24, 2^24]. You are also safe to add, subtract and multiply integers, without precision loss, as long as the answer lies within that same range. Dividing numbers will often lead to rounding errors.

To understand why just think of the example of 2/3 in base ten. Given a finite amount of memory, there is no way to store 0.66666666... because there are an infinite amount of sixes. There are ways to express six repeating in a finite amount of memory but floating point numbers don't do that, instead they only store a certain amount of digits before rounding the last digit.

One thing to keep in mind is that some decimal numbers may be repeating in binary whereas in decimal they are not. 0.1, for example cannot be represented exactly in a floating point number, instead it will end up being something like 0.10000000000000001. Some decimal number can fit perfectly inside a floating point number. The numbers 0.5, 0.25, 0.125 all can be perfectly represented in a floating point number. This is because they are a power of two, where the exponent is negative. 0.5 = 2^(-1), 0.25 = 2^(-2), 0.125=2^(-3) ect...

Any of these numbers that can fit in a floating point number can be safely added, subtracted, and multiplied without problems. So 0.5 * 16 == 8 holds true, but 0.1 * 10 != 1.

If you want to better understand floating point numbers I would recommend trying to convert some numbers by hand between decimal and binary floating point. Take a look at the wikipedia article on floating points to better understand them, but bottom of the article has an example on how to convert to floating point.

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