Stream: contributing

Topic: floating point equality

Brian Teague (Jan 12 2024 at 19:44):

Trying to implement isApproxEq and ran into this compile error:

Note: I can't derive Bool.isEq for floating-point types. That's
because Roc's floating-point numbers cannot be compared for total
equality - in Roc, NaN is never comparable to NaN. If a type
doesn't support total equality, it cannot support the Eq ability!

I need value == referenceValue for positive, negative infinity, +0 = -0, and exact matches.

If value or reference is Nan, it should always return false.

isApproxEq : { value: Frac a, referenceValue: Frac a, relativeTolerance ? Frac a, absoluteTolerance ? Frac a } -> Bool
isApproxEq = \{ value, referenceValue, relativeTolerance? 0.00001, absoluteTolerance? 0.000000001 }
->
if value == referenceValue then # For infinity
Bool.true
else
Num.absDiff value referenceValue <= absoluteTolerance + relativeTolerance * Num.abs referenceValue

Brian Teague (Jan 12 2024 at 21:00):

I need to do more research on how, Rust, Haskell, Python handle floating point equality.

Richard Feldman (Jan 12 2024 at 21:41):

you can get a == b for floats with a >= b && a <= b - it optimizes to equality behind the scenes

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 12 2024 at 23:47):

isApproxEq should consider 2 inifinities as not equal

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 12 2024 at 23:47):

So it should just need to be Num.absDiff value referenceValue <= absoluteTolerance + relativeTolerance * Num.abs referenceValue

Brian Teague (Jan 13 2024 at 15:33):

I think most languages return true when comparing infinity to infinity.

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 17:09):

For equality, yes (but only cause they have to to follow the ieee spec and it is the simple answer).

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 17:09):

For approximately equality that is actually useful, generally no to my understanding

Seems more things than expect default to them being equal. Actually a bit surprised. That will hide bugs in certain places.

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 17:16):

Can we make that an optional flag that defaults to true infinitiesEquivalent ? True

Richard Feldman (Jan 13 2024 at 20:06):

are the extra conditionals there worth it for the edge case, given that this is a numeric comparison that might be performed a lot?

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 20:18):

I mean if you expect infinities to be equivalent, it is required.

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 20:19):

This should compile down to something branchless

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 20:19):

So infinitiesEquivalent is just an extra boolean and.

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 20:20):

All the float numbers will outweigh that and there should be a lot of ILP, so I wouldn't really be concerned

Brendan Hansknecht (Jan 13 2024 at 20:20):

Though I might explictly write the branchless form in roc just to be safe

Brian Teague (Jan 18 2024 at 14:02):

I modified the tests to match numpy's website. The tests are passing including Infinity and NaN.
The PR is ready for review.

Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC