[Slightly OT]: More on ints and floats

[Cameron Laird]

In article <kauu6b.f2d1.ln at boundary.tundraware.com>,
Tim Daneliuk  <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
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>As a side note, this question was ultimately motivated by an entirely
>different sort of "pure math" question: Does (integer) 1 = 1.0?
>Engineers, physicists, and computer scientists all would
>say "no" because of the precision problem with the latter number.
>I am unclear, though, on whether a mathematician understands
>1.0 to mean 1.0000000... (a single number) or the _neighborhood_
>around 1 with one digit precision.
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I'm a (former) mathematician.  I've always taken "1.0"
to be a local, linguistic act, requiring me to infer
the speaker's context.  "1.0" means different things in
the mouths of different people.

The open interval (0.95, 1.05) is one of the plausible
interpretations.  It's not among the first half-dozen
likely to come to my mind, though; maybe in the top 
ten ...  
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html