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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Ada versus PL/I (was: Re: Ariane 5 - not an exception?)
Date: 1996/09/07
Message-ID: <dewar.842087548@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 179055388
references: <Pine.GSO.3.92.960831192310.8449A-100000@nunic.nu.edu>
 	<50dkud$t7h@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <m3vidvq5kj.fsf@gabi-soft.fr>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1
Date: 1996-09-07T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


James Kanze says

"This isn't true for C (and thus Turbo C), of course.  You have to
include math.h.  While it is a built in in older lanugages like Fortran
or Basic, most modern languages will require a declaration for the
function somewhere.  (I'm tempted to say that a language that doesn't
require a declaration for a function is somewhat deficient, but SQRT is
a special case.)"

I would definitely give in to this temptation (and say that a language
that does not require a definition for sqrt is deficient). In the absence
of a commitment to IEEE semantics, the definition of sqrt is not well
defined at the language level, and it is better that it come from a
designated library whose semantics are well defined (note that math.h
does not meet that requirement anyway, but certainly the math libraries
in Ada do meet this requirement).