On 2017-08-09 19:15, Bob Sneidar via use-livecode wrote:
OIC. I was under the impression that the C math libraries deal with numbers of high precision better than Livecode does, perhaps themselves generating errors on overflow. Maybe that is not the case.
C itself does no error checking/bounds checking at all. It is only relatively recently that compiler intrinsics have been available on all platforms we support which would allow an overflow check to be done efficiently (access to the carry flag).
Now, that would be fine if we used integers - which we don't - we use IEEE doubles.
Of course, the IEEE standard has long had in it the 'exceptions' model for detecting overflow/inexactness and such - however using *that* to efficiently do anything is nigh-on impossible universally. Performance of using the FP exceptions (even non-signalling) is highly variable across processor models and OS combinations.
Ideally LiveCode would use decimal arithmetic everywhere from the outside at least (with a fixed controllable precision - number of digits after the decimal point - for anything 'inexact'), and internally use infinite precision integers when there is nothing after the decimal point. That's more an engineering problem in terms of ensuring that in moving to such a model, performance of numeric operations (in general) does not decrease too much (there would be an overhead, its just trying to minimise it which causes all the hard work).
Generally C math libraries are infinite precision or nothing - although IBM has some nifty IEEE Decimal emulation code out in the wild blending that with other numeric representations is still not an easy task.
Warmest Regards, Mark. -- Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/ LiveCode: Everyone can create apps _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
