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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: logarithms on ada
Date: 1997/03/06
Message-ID: <E6Lt30.1Fy@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 223454310
References: <5fcqrs$ius@panther.Gsu.EDU> <dewar.857536154@merv>
 <dsmith-0503971354380001@dsmith.clark.net> <dewar.857613145@merv>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-03-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <dewar.857613145@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> 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, and I feel
like I'm above-average in the sense that I *know* I don't understand it
(as compared to the average programmer who seems to think floating-point
does (sort of) what we learned in grade school as rational arithmetic).
In grade-school, I was quite sure that (1/3)*3 = 1, exactly.  ;-)
Of course, in those days, I had the foolish notion that God had not
deemed 2**31-1 to be equal to infinity.  ;-)

- Bob