[clean-list] Re: 1.Floating Point Support (clean-list digest)

[Siegfried Gonzi]

clean-list-admin@cs.kun.nl wrote:

> > But hasn't Clean incorporated the BigNumerical-Library for that
> > issues?
>
> Oh, my goodness...
> There is a whole huge theory and practice around/behind that...

I know (okay, I write so that I know). But recently I red an article in "Spektrum
der Wissenschaft" (Sonderheft ueber Rechnerarchitekturen), that  it is
impossible, with the normal 32bit or 64bit to cover the hole range from -big to
+big.

Add a very small number to a very big number and after a few steps substract that
very small number from the big number. Here the programmer is obliged to think...

>
> A MUST (one of favourite words of the new French generation) is
> the article of David Goldberg: "What Every Computer Scientist
> Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic", published in
> Computing Surveys, March 1991, and available on-line
> (for example here):
>
> http://www.validgh.com/goldberg/paper.ps
>

Thank you, thank you. The problem is we are not teached in scientific computing
(everybody is forced to tech it himself; and that is a sad story for
physicists...).

> You will bury very deeply your "naive assumptions"...

I hope I will get an enlightenment.

S. Gonzi