🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3421@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes:


   | Con:  Floating-point is only an approximation to reality anyway, so the
   | business of "correctness" is silly.  THe answer will never be truly Right,
   | so who gives a flying rat's ass about eeking out that last bit of 'precision'.
   | The IEEE standard only serves to make programs "wrong" in the same artificial
   | way (instilling a false sense of security about the results), but ends up
   | making computers alot slower and more expensive, only to please some anal ret-
   | entive nerds in some ivory-tower committee.   (:-))

     Take a course in numerical analysis. A small reduction in accuracy can

I second the motion. Ideally the course will expose you  to case
studies where you will see bad algorithms, bad implementations of good
algorithms, ill-condition systems, and bad computer arithmetic (among
other things) the really interesting lesson is that you often can't
tell one failure from another from the symptoms.

Having 1% bad fp arithmetic is like playing russian roulette every
morning. It will bite you someday. Unlike RR, the bad fp will just
assist you in doing bad science. Perhaps that isn't a problem, just
think of all the extra papers/research we all get to do to disprove
the resulting drivel...

--
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Keith H. Bierman    keith.bierman@Sun.COM| khb@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM
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