On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 at 14:07:22 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 at 11:10:40 UTC, ixid wrote:
We really need to standard algorithms to be fast and perhaps
have separate ones for perfect technical accuracy.
While I agree with most of what you're saying, I don't think we
should prioritize performance over accuracy or correctness.
Especially for numerics people, precision is very important,
and it can make a just as bad first impression if we don't get
this right. We can however make the note in the documentation
(which already talks about performance) a bit more prominent:
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm_iteration.html#sum
Being new to the language, I certainly make no claims about what
the Phobos library should do, but coming from a heavy numerics
background in many languages, I can say that this is the first
time I've seen a common summation function do anything beyond
naive summation. Some languages feature more accurate options
separately, but never as the default, so it did not occur to me
to specifically check the documentation for something like sum()
(which is my fault, of course, no issues there). Having the more
accurate pairwise summation algorithm in the standard library is
certainly worthwhile for some applications, but I was a bit
surprised to see it as the default.
