Re: Weird results reading spreadsheet

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 2:48 PM, Steve Stevens <s_stevens@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Also be careful using eval(h). A couple years ago we discovered that IBM
and Microsoft round numbers differently when the last value being dropped
was five.

Well, it's not so much IBM and Microsoft as it is IEEE and Excel.
Almost everything in the world that uses floating point adheres to the
IEEE 754 standard. Excel doesn't quite. Close, but not exactly. In
terms of storage, it truly is exactly like IEEE. But in certain
operations, Excel fudges some things so that arithmetic is more like
what normal people would expect. That's because Excel was meant to be
used by normal people, not programmers.

I would be very surprised if all the Microsoft products round the way
Excel does. In particular, it would be difficult to fathom their
"serious" programming languages like C# not following IEEE.

John Y.