From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,6e70c13232dc4a26 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Norman H. Cohen" Subject: Re: logarithms on ada Date: 1997/03/06 Message-ID: <331F0AF6.31AF@watson.ibm.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 223926650 References: <5fcqrs$ius@panther.Gsu.EDU> Organization: IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Reply-To: ncohen@watson.ibm.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-06T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert A Duff wrote: > > In article , Robert Dewar wrote: > >I hope not! Any decent text book should teach you early on in simple > >terms how to compute logs etc. > > Really? I would think students shouldn't be exposed to floating-point > (and therefore logs and whatnot) until fairly late in the game. I know > *I* don't understand floating point arithmetic very well In most applications, you don't have to understand all the subtleties of floating-point arithmetic to use floating point. An age-old introductory programming assignment is to read three floating-point numbers A, B, and C, and print (approximations of) the solutions to the quadratic equation A * x**2 + B * x + C = 0. Students doing this assignment have to know where to find Ada.Numerics.Elementary_Functions.Sqrt. They don't have to know how to determine convergence of Newton's alogrithm for square roots. -- Norman H. Cohen mailto:ncohen@watson.ibm.com http://www.research.ibm.com/people/n/ncohen