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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: 1996/09/09
Message-ID: <dewar.842245668@schonberg>#1/1
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references: <Pine.GSO.3.92.960831192310.8449A-100000@nunic.nu.edu>
 	<50dkud$t7h@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <m3vidvq5kj.fsf@gabi-soft.fr>
 <dewar.842087548@schonberg> <51009c$n28@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1
Date: 1996-09-09T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Robin says

"   SQRT is well-defined in a range of languages.
It's sufficiently well-used that it be available
with a routine call, definitely facilitated
when it's part of the language, as indeed it should be."

No, sorry that's plain wrong, in languages like Fortran, sqrt is not
well-defined at all, no more than addition (for float) is well defined
in such languages. The last I remember, PL/I did not have any properly
defined floating-point semantics either (the standard was too early
to be significantly influenced by either IEEE or LIAS). I suspect
Robin is not a floating-point expert!