At 03:46 PM 8/29/00 -0400, Eric Roode wrote:
>Okay, brainstorming here ... bear with me.
>
>What if limit-of-error precision were tracked, as Perl tracks tainted
>variables when you tell it to?
Can't be done that way, unfortunately. You need to enforce significant
digits at every step of the calculation you make, or you can end up with
insignificant digits altering the results.
>This would be a feature, like taint, that would only be turned on when
>the programmer explicitly asked for it, as I expect it would slow things
>down somewhat, and would not be used by many people. Mostly scientific
>and maybe financial people, I'd think.
Significant digits are really only used when there's some slop in the
numbers, usually when they're derived from measurements. Financial calcs,
for example, don't suffer from that problem. They, instead, need good
fixed-point math, which has its own problems.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
