Читать книгу Applied Numerical Methods Using MATLAB - Won Y. Yang - Страница 28

Digital systems like calculators and computers hardly make a mistake, since they follow the programmed order faithfully. Nonetheless, we often encounter some numerical errors in the computing results made by digital systems, mostly coming from representing the numbers in finite bits, which is an intrinsic limitation of digital world. If you let the computer compute something without considering what is called the finite‐word‐length effect, you might come across a weird answer. In that case, it is not the computer, but yourself as the user or the programmer, who is to blame for the wrong result. In this context, we should always be careful not to let the computer produce a farfetched output. In this section, we will see how the computer represents and stores the numbers. Then we think about the cause and the propagation effect of computational error in order not to be deceived by unintentional mistake of the computer and hopefully, to be able to take some measures against them.