Why does this code generate a mix of integers and doubles?

Question

chiral 2022-5-25

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评论： chiral 2022-5-25

When I run the following code it generates a mixture of integers and decimal points which I can't use for array indexing.

        for j = 0:0.1:3
            disp(j*10+1);
        end

Output:

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Stephen23 2022-5-25

编辑：Stephen23 2022-5-25

"it seems like Matlab interprets the figures which appear as an integer to be an integer"

MATLAB displays binary floating point numbers with zero fractional part without any trailing fractional digits. The trailing zeros e.g. "X.0000" tells us that the fractional part is not zero (not matter how small it might be).

"Why doesn't this work for all of them?"

Because how floating point error accumulates depends on the values and operations concerned: sometimes it might appear to "cancel out", sometime it might increase. That is simply how binary floating point numbers are.

"I'm just curious if there is a reason why Matlab only treats some of these as integers."

Because only some of them are whole numbers.

chiral 2022-5-25

I see, thanks!

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Answer 1

Bjorn Gustavsson 2022-5-25

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In practice you can look on this problem as "good luck" and "bad luck" when it comes to working and not working. The rounding of fixed precision floating-point arithmetic is intricate, look for the blog-posts on these matters by Cleve Moler or Loren Shure (and possibly others). From a practical perspective the rounding-errors might turn up as you expect, but since 0.1 has an infinite expansion in binary you cannot expect it to always give you that result. Therefore when you calculate indices the robust approach is to explicitly handle this by casting your flint-numbers into proper integers with round - then you know that you have made a concious design-choise of how to handle this (hopefully a good design-choise too).

Once uppon a time matlab used to round general floats in matrix-indexing operations which for my application was incredibly convenient, then they changed that rounding-operation to floor instead of round - which I "handled short-term" by adding 1/2 to my indices, the next change was to require integers into the indexing - which forces us to make this design-choise explicitly.

HTH