RE: A question about Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg34571] RE: [mg34559] A question about Mathematica
- From: "DrBob" <majort at cox-internet.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 02:44:12 -0400 (EDT)
- Reply-to: <drbob at bigfoot.com>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Huang, If the fractions were really A/A and B/B, both would be exactly 1, and equal to each other. We need to see some details of your computation. Bobby -----Original Message----- From: Chen-Ying Huang [mailto:chenying at ccms.ntu.edu.tw] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net Subject: [mg34571] [mg34559] A question about Mathematica Hi, I have a question about Mathematica and yet I couldn't find an answer to. Could you please consider giving me a help on this? This is not a long question and I hope it won't bother you too much. I was doing some computations. A computation gives me something like A/A, another computation gives me something like B/B. I then do a true-false statement, that is, If [A/A>=B/B, 1, 0]. Since both computations (A/A and B/B) equal to one, the statement is true and hence the If statement should lend a 1 as specified. However, I found out that the If statement lends a zero because somehow, in the computations, A/A is less than B/B by the order of 10 to the power of -16. Some friends told me that it must be because the bytes used by the computations A/A and B/B are different, so to correct this problem, I should assign the maximum byte to each object. Since I am not very familiar with Mathematica, after an afternoon's search, I still have no clue about how to do that. Could anyone give me a help on this? I really appreciate it. ChenYing Huang