- From: Dave Peterson <davep@iit.edu>
- Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 21:38:21 -0400
- To: "Richard H. McCullough" <rhm@PioneerCA.com>, paul@sparrow-hawk.org, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Cc: Rob Shearer <rob.shearer@comlab.ox.ac.uk>, public-webont-comments@w3.org, public-owl-wg@w3.org, www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
Let me put one thing to bed once and for all: No one that I'm aware of believes that (*absent artificial "coloring" for distinction*) the value space of float is not a subset of the value space of double, or that the value space of double is not a subset of the value space of decimal. The problem is in the details of all the additional baggage a datatype carries, over and above its value space. At 4:38 PM -0700 2008-07-07, Richard H. McCullough wrote: >I suggest that you consider following the example of classical >mathematical analysis -- the delta-epsilon arguments -- or the >example of engineering approximations. I'm very interested in knowing how Leibnizian epsilon-delta arguments impact the question of how one can or should derive double, and then float, from decimal. >Domains may be disjoint in theory, but when you make real measurements, >and consider measurement precision/errors, they're not really disjoint. True. But there's a lot of difference between saying you have "numbers" whose exact value you don't know (a la precisionDecimal) and saying that you have a fixed finite set of numbers into which you must jam all your values. Some of the Schema WG members won't even talk to me about precision any more because I get into too much detail as to just what precision is in engineering measurement contexts. Best don't get me started. ;-) -- Dave Peterson SGMLWorks! davep@iit.edu
Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2008 01:39:13 UTC