[Haskell-beginners] ghci: inconsistent return values for succ

[Frothy Bits]

@ Kostiantyn: Thank you again for the links to Decimal and Data.Fixed
@ Iustin: You're absolutely correct, I was abusing succ.  I blame myself.
@ Rein: Thank you, I'd previously shared the goldberg paper; it's
illuminating.

Fwiw, prior to adventures with succ, I'd noticed that simple operations on
certain simple real numbers would give "exciting" results. (Undoubtedly, I
should have just gone with that instead of posting about succ; apologies
again for confusing Iustin.)

ghci> map (+ 0.01)[0.01,0.02 .. 1.00]

for example, gave me a nice list of visually stimulating values for the
reasons Rein and Kostiantyn pointed out.  With succ, I wondered what I
would see if I did something "wrong."  My assumption was that it would
flail and give me an error message, something along the lines of "Fool,
that is not the proper way to succ.  Go play with natural numbers." That
I'd get occasionally expected values with either the above or succ
was.....peculiar,  until reading Kostiantyn's replies and finding and
reading the Goldberg paper, not to mention having a "Forth moment" and
remembering scaled integer......

I (foolishly or not) made the assumption that Haskell would do something
different with floats "out of the box."  I do realize the same issues are
inherent in other languages, but I wondered if it might be "smart,"
recognize I was calculating with real numbers and automagically either load
what I needed or point me in that direction.  That said, I really
appreciate Rein's reply and recognize that picking Double for the extended
default rules is "a good choice."

Anyway, after loading Data.Fixed, this produces reasonable output:

ghci> map (+ (0.01 :: Fixed E2)) [0.01,0.02 .. 1.01]

Back to reading and learning by cutting myself.  Thanks again all.


On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 8:57 AM, Frothy Bits <neuralpancake at gmail.com>
wrote:

> @ Kostiantyn: Thank you.
>
> Is the behavior I'm seeing actually related to a bug in parsec?
>
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29820870/floating-point-numbers-precision-and-parsec
>
> Yes or no, why wouldn't it be the default behavior of ghc to load the
> Decimal package?
>
> OTOH, the current default floating point behavior certainly got me
> thinking and digging:
>
> http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Frothy Bits <neuralpancake at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> @ Dan Stromberg:  Thanks, understood.
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Frothy Bits <neuralpancake at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings,
>>>
>>> Absolutely brand new to Haskell.  Taking ghci v7.10.2 out for a spin,
>>> and I find I get inconsistent return values for succ n:
>>>
>>> ghci> succ 3.14
>>> 4.1400000000000001
>>>
>>> for example instead of the expected 4.14
>>>
>>> succ 2.14 and 4.14 give the expected results. but succ 2.14 returns
>>> 2.1399999999999997.  This anomalous behavior runs through the range of
>>> n.nn;  in the n.01 range, for example, 16.01 and 63.01 return wonky results
>>> per above.
>>>
>>> I tested this on Windows and Linux (various flavors) and I get the same
>>> results there and in the interactive test code space on haskell.org.
>>>
>>> I'm not familiar enough with the language, yet, to go debugging this on
>>> my own, but it would seem to be at least a problem with how succ is
>>> implemented, if not how values are handled in general.....which could
>>> potentially be bad if you were trying to do anything requiring precise
>>> calculations....
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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