[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #61143] Functions sum and mean returns wrong answer for single precision input

[anonymous]

Follow-up Comment #18, bug #61143 (project octave):

As this report has become a discussion, may I respectfully offer this input,
echoing comment #7. There is no substitute for knowing the hardware
representation for floating point types when using numerical software like
Octave. This isn't something that can be worked around. Summing up 100e6
singles can and will cause it to overflow as the OP saw, and that is exactly
per spec. That sort of error is predictable, easy to understand, easy to avoid
as one gains experience with floating point. If the software does automatic
upcasting to double, it will cause more confusion for those who do expect
errors, and those bugs will be insidious and more difficult to track down. I
recommend that we keep the current behavior, and anyone getting unexpected
results in single or any of the integer types can always manually invoke sum
(foo, "extra") or sum (double (foo)).

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