[+chat, -programming] I recommend reading through Mike Cowlishaw's material on algorism, http://speleotrove.com/decimal/; binary floating point isn't the only game in town (as our friendly neighbourhood x: will tell you).
I've always had a lot of time for Rexx's approach. /M On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 9:30 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all ! > 16 digits of precision and a range between 10^306 and 10^_306 is of course > quite much. Even if problems in theory exists, maybe in practice they > don't, or they are rare enough for most applications. I would believe that > people who are responsible for really important calculations are also able > to assure that their results are correct. There are of course ways to > estimate the errors and to do calculations in ways that minimizes them. > Anyway, I think its important to think about these things now and then if > you work with software development. > Cheers, > Erling > > > On 2017-09-21 16:39, Henry Rich wrote: > >> I don't know of any "random" results. There are inexact results stemming >> from the approximations inherent in limited-precision floating-point >> arithmetic. If those approximations cause problems in your application, >> stay away from floating-point. >> >> J does not conform to IEEE always; in particular 0^0 is 1. We think that >> is an improvement on IEEE-754. >> >> Henry Rich >> >> >> On 9/21/2017 9:54 AM, Erling Hellenäs wrote: >> >>> We had problems with random results in another thread, so I looked at >>> this. It seems obvious that these problems exist. If you want you can deny >>> it of course. /Erling >>> >>> >>> Den 2017-09-21 kl. 15:44, skrev Raul Miller: >>> >>>> I would start by better understanding the specific problem I was >>>> trying to solve. >>>> >>>> (As opposed to coming up with a solution and then looking for a >>>> problem that fits to it...) >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> >>>> >>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >>> >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
