Re: Negative zero doesn't exist

Op 30.mei.2025 om 16:10 schreef Richard Damon:

On 5/30/25 5:09 AM, Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 30/05/2025 09:16, Mikko wrote:
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<snip>
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However, when working with approximate values it may be useful
to know whether the true value is positive or negative even
when for other values a little more or less is insignifcant.
One such case is temperature where the difference between -0.1
°C can be significantly different from +0.1 °C for practical
purpoises even when the difference between, say, 5 °C and 6 °C
isn't.

>
Practical porpoises will avoid -0.1°C because it makes swimming too difficult.
>

 But porpoises swim in salt water, which will still be liquid at that temperature, but colder than they like.
  Minus 0 in IEEE is mostly an artifact of the representation, being a sign + magnatude representation.

Other systems have even more possibilities to represent 0. E.g., pencil and paper can be used to represent 0 as 0, 0.0, 0.00, 000, 00.0, 0.0E0, -0.0, etc. It is not uncommon that a single number can be represented in different ways in certain systems. Usually, nobody makes a problem of it, as it is understood that always the same number is represented.