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Excel Math Bug
"fred" wrote...
.... Why shouldn't a language calculate equations in the way a calculus teacher would? ... Apparently they just don't. I'm guessing it's because the programmers don't know the right way to do it, because most programmers aren't mathematicians; or because there would be too much work involved at any given point in the project. Why else? .... Maybe because computers aren't usually working with equations or true real (or complex) numbers. Computers generally deal with finite precision binary arithmetic calculations, and those have complications that have ensnared many mathematicians who don't appreciate the difference. For instance, binary floating point addition and multiplication are both commutative, as expected, but neither is strictly associative, only approximately so. Evaluation order using the same operator is critical in software development and usually not at all in mathematics. |
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