From: bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)
Subject: [COFF] floating point (Re: Old and Tradition was [TUHS] V9 shell
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 15:56:20 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <A3B993A8-553F-45B4-869B-96698D7EBC2E@bitblocks.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <96B92BC1-F4AF-448E-8453-E77C27E7B545@bitblocks.com>
> On Feb 12, 2020, at 3:54 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 12, 2020, at 3:05 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 04:45:54PM -0600, Charles H Sauer wrote:
>>> If I recall correctly:
>>> - all doctoral candidates ended up taking two semesters of numerical
>>> analysis. I still have two volume n.a. text in the attic (orange, but not
>>> "burnt orange", IIRC).
>>> - numerical analysis was covered on the doctoral qualifying exam.
>>
>> Pretty sure Madison required that stuff for Masters degrees. Or maybe
>> undergrad, I feel like I took that stuff pretty early on.
>>
>> I'm very systems oriented so I can't imagine I would have taking that
>> willingly. I hate the whole idea of floating point, just seems so
>> error prone.
>
> David Goldberg's article "What every computer scientist should know
> about floating-point arithmetic" is a good one to read:
> https://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/bachelor/IEEE754_article.pdf
>
> I still have Bill Press's Numerical Recipes book though not opened
> recently (as in not since '80s)!
>
> It is interesting that older languages such as Lisp & APL have a
> builtin concept of tolerance. Here 0.3 < 0.1 + 0.2 is false. But
> in most modern languages it is true! This is so since 0.1 + 0.2 is
> 0.30000000000000004. In Fortran you'd write something like
> abs(0.3 - (0.1 + 0.2)) > tolerance. You can do the same in C
> etc.but for some reason it seems to be uncommon :-)
Er... not right. Fl. pt. arithmetic is hard!
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-02-12 23:56 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 24+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-02-11 18:41 [COFF] " clemc
[not found] ` <CAP2nic2C4-m_Epcx7rbW2ssbS850ZFiLKiL+hg1Wxbcwoaa1vQ@mail.gmail.com>
2020-02-12 0:57 ` [COFF] Fwd: " athornton
2020-02-12 1:58 ` clemc
2020-02-12 3:01 ` lm
2020-02-12 18:12 ` clemc
2020-02-12 21:55 ` cym224
2020-02-12 22:11 ` imp
2020-02-12 22:45 ` sauer
2020-02-12 23:05 ` lm
2020-02-12 23:54 ` [COFF] floating point (Re: " bakul
2020-02-12 23:56 ` bakul [this message]
2020-02-13 1:21 ` toby
2020-02-13 6:57 ` [COFF] Fwd: " peter
2020-02-16 21:47 ` wobblygong
2020-02-16 22:10 ` clemc
2020-02-16 22:45 ` krewat
2020-02-16 23:50 ` bakul
2020-02-18 0:17 ` dave
2020-02-18 12:48 ` jpl.jpl
2020-02-24 9:40 ` ik
2020-02-24 15:19 ` lm
[not found] ` <CAP2nic0fK+=eh=5MuY4BJH6zx4tCRMWcazmm1khYMzNmEdf8ug@mail.gmail.com>
2020-02-24 16:15 ` [COFF] [TUHS] Fwd: Old and Tradition was " clemc
2020-02-24 16:19 ` clemc
2020-02-24 16:27 ` [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was [TUHS] " clemc
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