Hidden Precision

Sometimes when I work with some data, that data is more precise than I expect. One might think that would be a good thing, after all precision is good, so more is better. But hidden precision can lead to some subtle bugs.

const validityStart = new Date("2016-10-01");   // JavaScript
const validityEnd = new Date("2016-11-08");
const isWithinValidity = aDate => (aDate >= validityStart && aDate <= validityEnd);
const applicationTime = new Date("2016-11-08 08:00");

assert.notOk(isWithinValidity(applicationTime));  // NOT what I want

What happened in the above code is that I intended to create an inclusive date range by specifying the start and end dates. However I didn't actually specify dates, but instants in time, so I'm not marking the end date as November 8th, I'm marking the end as the time 00:00 on November 8th. As a consequence any time (other than midnight) within November 8th falls outside the date range that's intended to include it.

Hidden precision is a common problem with dates, because it's sadly common to have a date creation function that actually provides an instant like this. It's an example of poor naming, and indeed general poor modeling of dates and times.

Dates are a good example of the problems of hidden precision, but another culprit is floating point numbers.

const tenCharges = [
  0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10,
  0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10,
];
const discountThreshold = 1.00;
const totalCharge = tenCharges.reduce((acc, each) => acc += each);
assert.ok(totalCharge < discountThreshold);   // NOT what I want

When I just ran it, a log statement showed totalCharge was 0.9999999999999999. This is because floating point doesn't exactly represent many values, leading to a little invisible precision that can show up at awkward times.

One conclusion from this is that you should be extremely wary of representing money with a floating point number. (If you have a fractional currency part like cents, then usually it's best to use integers on the fractional value, representing €5.00 with 500, preferably within a money type) The more general conclusion is that floating point is tricksy when it comes to comparisons (which is why test framework asserts always have a precision for comparisons).