🚀 go-pugleaf

> ...what do the people on the net feel about transcendental functions?
> The Whetstone seems to me to place more emphasis on them than real life.
> One of the reasons for not including them directly in the 32081 was that
> it was felt that implementing them in math routines instead of hardware 
> was more cost effective.  Is this true or are transcendentals important
> enough for the increased cost of implementing them in hardware?

Personally, while I strongly suspect that a software implementation is
more cost-effective than doing them in hardware, putting them on-chip
strikes me as a marvellous way of getting them right once and for all
and encouraging everyone to use the done-right version.  (This does assume,
of course, that the chip-maker spends the necessary money to *get* them
right, which requires high-paid specialists and a lot of work.)  One
could get much the same effect with a bare-bones arithmetic chip and a
ROM chip containing the math routines, except that ROMs are too easy to
copy and you'd never recover the investment needed to do a good job.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry