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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what the correct result is for the Interval Arithmetic example? I coded it in five environments and got 1.172604, -.8273960599468214, 1.17260394005318, 2.62722e39, and 1.17260394.

So the consensus is 1.172 etc., but I'm guessing based on the article that despite consensus it's wrong.

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The right answer is -54767/66192, so whichever program said -.827 is probably right.

There was a good discussion on the list: http://groups.google.com/group/emerginglangs/browse_thread/t...

Basically if your language uses floats by default then it will get that challenge wrong, and if it uses fractions or arbitrary-precision decimals, then it'll get it right.

Ha!, funny -- the environments I used were:

  Revolution
  FileMaker Pro
  Numbers
  J -- my J is weak and rusty, so it's probably my fault
  Excel

So the database wins.

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