[Haskell-cafe] Sinus in Haskell

[Jules Bean]

Brent Yorgey wrote:
> 
> More generally, this is due to the fact that floating-point numbers can 
> only have finite precision, so a little bit of rounding error is 
> inevitable when dealing with irrational numbers like pi.   This problem 
> is in no way specific to Haskell.

But some systems always display to a slightly lower precision than they 
calculate. Some pocket calculators work like this, and I suspect some 
programming languages might. You can conceal the first few instances of 
rounding errors this way (until they get a bit bigger and punch through 
your reduced precision).

Jules