[racket] What is inexactness about?

Stephen Bloch writes:

> An example in my textbook is
>
> (define TANK-CAPACITY-GALLONS #i13.6) (define MPG #i28)
>
> because the capacity of a gas tank, and miles-per-gallon fuel
> efficiency, are based on physical measurements and therefore
> inherently inexact.

I think this is misguided. The proper response to uncertainty in data is 
to use something like interval arithmetic (which is, of course, beyond 
scope for an introductory course).

"Inexact" in Racket is code for IEEE double-precision floating point. 
This represents a fixed set of numbers in such a way that many 
computations that would mathematically produce a value not in that set 
will instead produce as close a value in the set as possible.
That value may have little to do with the uncertainty in the original 
data, and may display in a peculiar way (e.g. 5.999999 when 6.0 would be 
more readable and just as "inexact"), so I don't think it's a good idea 
to use inexact values in the given circumstance, if all you're doing 
with the data are elementary arithmetic operations.

The one place I tell my students to use inexact arithmetic with 
elementary operations is if the exact computation will result in values 
with a large representation -- for example, in doing some sort of simple 
physical simulation where the position or velocity of a particle is 
updated by some method involving division or multiplication. It's 
another "CS requires not only the creation of abstractions, but their 
systematic violation" teaching moment. --PR