The complexities of the "edge effects" are best kept out of the spreadsheet, as Morten indicates. However, there are some computations that might be influenced by how a particular internal calculation is performed. I was earlier looking at the ends of the Gaussian (normal) distribution where one gets some weirdness in Excel. This could be because very small numbers are handled poorly.
It is in the special functions etc. that I would think Gnumeric and other spreadsheets are most likely to be interested in IEEE 754 and its revision. Must admit I was unaware of 754r activity. Thanks Dave. For info, there's a nice Wikipedia item at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754r with a link to a recent essay by Velvel Kahan (who was really the person who got all the floating point stuff going, and in the 1960s pretty well embarassed IBM into retrofitting the 360 with guard digits for floating point) that gives a nice and nasty example using Excel. I've tried this in Gnumeric and get somewhat different results, but which I'm sure would upset novice users. JN Morten Welinder wrote: > Gnumeric does not let you access NaN etc. It would interfere with the > desired semantics. > > Morten > _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list gnumeric-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
