Paul A Bristow wrote: Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 1:46 AM To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] Interest in dimension/unit-checking library?
We are talking about implicit conversions from feet to meters here - almost certainly lossless. You need to read Matt's quite complicated arguments for these.
Unless I'm mistaken, this is only a theoretically lossless operation. In the real world of precision issues and whatnot, a conversion back and forth might result in a slightly different answer. Given the fact that a number divided by 10 and then multiplied by 10 might not result in the original number, the feet-meter conversion certainly can't be made lossless. Even worse, although converting from feet to inches is lossless (excluding overflow considerations), converting from inches to feet is not lossless. I really hate floating point! -- Noah