Info

This question is closed. Reopen it to edit or answer.

Error while assigning a variable

1 view (last 30 days)
Himanshu Garg
Himanshu Garg on 1 Jul 2020
Closed: MATLAB Answer Bot on 20 Aug 2021
if I assign x a value of 16.000001 then it stores 16.00000100000001... and if I assign x avalue of 15.000001 then it stores 15.00000099999999.. . How to remove this error

Answers (2)

dipak nigam
dipak nigam on 2 Jul 2020
You can refer to this answer to understand the above behaviour.
A possible workaround is to define these values as:
xN = 15000001;
yN = 16000001;
D = 1000000;
and then use them in your calculations for best possible precision.

Shubhankar Poundrik
Shubhankar Poundrik on 2 Jul 2020
Hi Himanshu,
I understand that you are trying to store floating point numbers in variables and are not sure why the value in the variable is slightly different from what you entered.
This problem occurs because not all floating point numbers can be accurately represented in binary format. To store the float (floating point number) a certain number of bytes are used, and the binary representation of the float may have 1s beyond what can be stored in the available bytes.
Read for more detailed explanation :
Regards,
Shubhankar.
  1 Comment
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 2 Jul 2020
Statistically, the fraction of real numbers that can be stored as floating point, is zero. There are real numbers, but less than floating point numbers, and a finite non-zero number divided by an infinite quantity gives 0.

Products

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!