[Bug 8047] Reflecting floats: The rules for parsing floating point number values return an unlimited-precision (finite in base 10) number. How is it converted to limited-precision IDL attribute types? In particular, what rounding mode is used? and do very large valu

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8047


Philip Taylor <excors@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|RESOLVED                    |CLOSED




--- Comment #6 from Philip Taylor <excors@gmail.com>  2009-10-27 14:36:54 ---
My original doubt was about numbers like 1 + 2^-53:

1.00000000000000011102230246251565404236316680908203125

where a perturbation in the final digit can change whether the closest
(double-precision) number is 1.0 or 1.0+epsilon. ECMAScript explicitly
truncates strings to 20 significant digits before rounding, so implementations
don't have to (but may) examine an unlimited number of characters.

However, it looks like most browser JS implementations do examine every digit
when parsing numbers. (Only IE and Opera-on-Linux appear to truncate.)

So it seems the truncation behaviour is not necessary, and what HTML5 currently
defines is reasonable and implementable, as far as I can tell. Implementors can
complain if they don't like it. (And in practice it only matters in crazy edge
cases anyway.)


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Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2009 14:36:56 UTC