Floating points...

Saw this on reddit, didn't know what it meant there either. Is this a precision joke? The english being broken doesn't help.

@Demolishun I think it's valid english, like "Look what they need in order to mimic a fraction"

@12bitfloat look 'into' what they need to mimic a fraction.

look at , etc

Ok here is what I think the joke is:

We need floating point numeric types like Float and Double to represent (mimic?) fractions and Mathematicians find it pathetic because something like 1/3 gets ugly.

The joke is kinda lame because it‘s quite easy to represent fractions with custom types accurately and it‘s obvious that floating point types are a compromise of performance and utility, not just for fractions.

It‘s a bit like making fun of how integer types are limited to a specific range.

@Demolishun Ehh, maybe it's missing a comma

Yup we can always create a custom class, storing the enumator and denominator separately, on construction. Implement the math operations ourselves. But what's the point? Unless you are making a math tutor app for students.

@Demolishun it's a direct quote from invincible with part of the text blacked out, it's just colloquial speech

Oh boy, @-red. This one's for you!

@scor
Rip in peace @-red 😭

@notroot
You should have told me.

@notroot
I feel you.
But you really scared me there.
Gotta chroot into that baby, I assume?
Or had you hardened your system?

Mathematicians may turn a blind eye to floating point, but for most practical applications, the performance/utility balance is hard to beat. The “ugliness” of something like 1/3 in a floating point format is just a side effect of representing an infinite decimal number in finite bits - it's not ideal, but it works in real-world use cases like graphics or simulations. I've been studying math for years. And I even use https://plainmath.me/ sometimes to test myself or learn something new, and this joke has been around for a long time among college math majors. And yes, the joke is not very good, because there are special types for fractions and rational numbers, but they are not widely used because of the overhead.