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FloatingPoint

Floating-point is a way to represent decimal numbers. It is what Emacs uses when you write 5.0 instead of 5, or other decimals like 5.3.

You can read an introduction to floating points at the Emacs manual.

Unexpected results

One can obtain intriguing results when dealing with floating numbers. For instance, even though (+ 3.1 0.1) does return the expected result 3.2, the code (+ 3.2 0.1) returns 3.3000000000000003. Furthermore, (= 3.3 (+ 3.2 0.1)) returns nil, and that means that 3.2 + 0.1 is not equal to 3.3 when working with floating-point arithmetic. This straightforward example shows why it’s bad practice to test floating-point numbers for equality.

While it’s better the organize the code in such a way that such equality tests are unnecessary, one can resort to fuzzy arithmetic in such cases. Basically one tests equality of two floating-point numbers within a given tolerance. See fuzz.el for code implementing fuzzy tests in Emacs.

Note that the tolerance is bound by the way floating-point numbers are represented in a specific computer processor.

Precision

Question: how to get more precision than 1e-14? For instance, in 3.3000000000000003 the error is relatively big if you require 14 decimal digits. If precision were 1e-80, the result could be 3.300000000…{80 zeros here}…00003 and could be easily trimmed off. – DCL

Answer: See above and also the reference bellow (“What every Computer Scientist should know…”).
Not an answer. One) The document is interesting+important but so long that I cannot see the answer in O(1) time :-). Two) Avoiding using float numbers is not always possible: not always you are comparing them, but sometimes you need the result. For instance, (+ 0.14285700113456 0.111111) seems to be 0.25396800113456003, but that’s wrong! The last 3 decimals are spurious, and therefore I would not like it for instance in a public document produced by Emacs. So: how can you calculate in Emacs with more precision than 1e-14? – DCL
If you want the short answer: You can’t. At least not with ‘+, the built-in float type and in O(1). Calc, see below, offers arbitrary precision, though. – nschum

How to use the arbitrary precision from calc

Make sure you have Calc loaded. It is part of Emacs.

Interactively

You can use the interactive mode to do calculations without precision loss. For instance: M-x calc RET 3.2 RET 0.1 RET + is 3.3, not the 3.3000000000000003 from before.

You can change the precision with the „p“ key followed by a number. For instance: M-x calc RET p 50 RET 1 RET 7 / is 0.14285714285714285714285714285714285714285714285714.

From LISP programs

Use this to change the precision: (calc-eval '(calc-precision 20) 'eval)

And this to compute the result of an expression: (calc-eval "1/7")

So, if you need to avoid precision loss, substitute your (+ 3.2 0.1) by (calc-eval "3.2+0.1")

Consider changing also calc's float display format

You may find that, even with 50-digits precision, calc still displays (calc-eval “0.008+10.0^-3”) as “9e-3”. If you were expecting to see the 50 decimal numbers, maybe you want to change the display format from the default to „fixed“:

This will make calc show "0.00900000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000" instead of “9e-3”. Remember: this is display format (not calculation precision), so don’t ask for an excessive number of decimals!

See also