A little presumptuously perhaps, I shall reply for 'someone' He or she would appear to be a soul mate.
The remark about floating-point that Mr Hermannsfeldt attributes to Knuth are relevant to HFP and, perhaps, BFP. Their timing moots any relevance to Cowlishaw's DFP. Moreover, they arev not relevant to it: it uses decimal digits, sand Mr Hermamnnsfeldt's post does not petray any acquaintance with it. The rest of Mr Hermannsfeldt's is also less than confidence-inspiring. Consider, <begin extract> The period of the earth's orbit is 365.256363004 days, or known to about 1 part in ten to the 11th. </end extract> Now there are many measurements and calendrical definitions of the period of the earth's orbit. The measurements most widely used are those for the mean tropical year, the time between successive vernal equinoxes. Its current value is 365.2421_9668, but its precision is an elusive notion because its value is known to be dropping. Now one of the major differences between the old Julian calendar, which has a mean year length during its four-year cycles of 365.25 days, and the 'new' Gregorian calendar, which has a mean year length of 365.2425 days during its 400-year cycles, is just their very different leap-year rules, which give rise to these differences. Mr Hermannsfeldt's number suggests that the Julian calendar is better at handling precession than the Gregorian one, but this is not the professional consensus. E. B. White said long ago that people who like the word 'personalize' should of course be free to use it but not perhaps to teach others to do so. My view of Mr Hermannsfeldt's views on floating-point arithmetic is of a piece. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
