Towards an API for the real numbers

Abstract

The real numbers are pervasive, both in daily life, and in mathematics. Students spend much time studying their properties. Yet computers and programming languages generally provide only an approximation geared towards performance, at the expense of many of the nice properties we were taught in high school. Although this is entirely appropriate for many applications, particularly those that are sensitive to arithmetic performance in the usual sense, we argue that there are others where it is a poor choice. If arithmetic computations and result are directly exposed to human users who are not floating point experts, floating point approximations tend to be viewed as bugs. For applications such as calculators, spreadsheets, and various verification tasks, the cost of precision sacrifices is high, and the performance benefit is often not critical. We argue that previous attempts to provide accurate and understandable results for such applications using the recursive reals were great steps in the right direction, but they do not suffice. Comparing recursive reals diverges if they are equal. In many cases, comparison of numbers, including equal ones, is both important, particularly in simple cases, and intractable in the general case. We propose an API for a real number type that explicitly provides decidable equality in the easy common cases, in which it is often unnatural not to. We describe a surprisingly compact and simple implementation in detail. The approach relies heavily on classical number theory results. We demonstrate the utility of such a facility in two applications: testing floating point functions, and to implement arithmetic in Google's Android calculator application.