From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: wobblygong at gmail.com (Wesley Parish) Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 10:47:36 +1300 Subject: [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was [TUHS] V9 shell In-Reply-To: References: <20200212030152.GJ852@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: I think it's implicit with fooling around with slide rules. Everything is logarithmic, therefore imprecise beyond a certain level (floating point number or iteration, it's the same problem). You learn to approximate, within a certain level of confidence (or diffidence :). (FWVLIW - I bought a Dover book on slide rule in the late 70s while at high school, and shortly after, a real slide rule, and it's stuck with me.) Wesley Parish On 2/13/20, Clem Cole wrote: > On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 10:01 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > >> What little Fortran background I have suggests that the difference >> might be mind set. Fortran programmers are formally trained (at least I >> was, there was a whole semester devoted to this) in accumulated errors. >> You did a deep dive into how to code stuff so that the error was reduced >> each time instead of increased. It has a lot to do with how floating >> point works, it's not exact like integers are. > > Just a thought, but it might also be the training. My Dad (a > mathematician and 'computer') passed a few years ago, I'd love to have > asked him. But I suspect when he and his peeps were doing this with a > slide rule or at best an Friden mechanical adding machine, they were > acutely aware of how errors accumulated or not. When they started to > convert their processes/techniques to Fortran in the early 1960s, I agree > with you that I think they were conscious of what they were doing. I'm > not sure modern CS types are taught the same things as what might be taught > in a course being run by a pure scientist who cares in the same way folks > like our mothers and fathers did in the 1950s and 60s. >