Re: floating point comparison

["W. Wesley Groleau x4923" <wwgrol@pseserv3.fw.hac.com>]

> > I've worked with a lot of decent programmers whose degrees are in
> > English, History, EE, ME, .... and most of them could say the same.
> > I KNOW some of my colleagues have no clue how floating point numbers
> > are represented, yet still manage to produce working code.
> 
> And that's the problem. Programmers are satisfied if they can "produce
> working code", i.e. the program does what I expect it to do. But if 
> you don't care about numerical problems, the program will give you a 
> nice result, which might be wrong. Just take SAS as an example of a
> commercial widely used wrong software.
 
"what I expect it to do" is meet its requirements.  And the requirements
rarely tolerate wrong answers.  So when I say "working code" I mean code
that gives right answers.  To put it another way, we did have a few
people on the project with degrees in mathematics, and I don't recall 
ever hearing one say, "That won't work because xxxx" where xxxx was 
something to do with floating point.
 
What I'm trying to say is that it should be possible to come up with a 
few simple guidelines that cover most cases, and a guideline for 
identifying the cases that require a mathematician--excuse me, a 
numerical analyst.

-- 
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    Wes Groleau, Hughes Defense Communications, Fort Wayne, IN USA
Senior Software Engineer - AFATDS                  Tool-smith Wanna-be

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