Jake Lishman • 4/2/2024

Signed zeroes and complex literals

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This technical article delves into the IEEE-754 floating-point standard's signed zero (-0.0 vs. 0.0), explaining its bit-level representation and behavioral differences, especially in operations with limits or discontinuities like division and atan2. It details why this prevents certain compiler optimizations and discusses a practical, impactful problem encountered in Qiskit when porting quantum computing code to Rust, where signed zeroes in complex number calculations led to differing results between NumPy and the faer library.

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#floating-point #ieee-754 #atan2
Signed zeroes and complex literals

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