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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Ada function sqrt(x)
Date: 1996/09/21
Message-ID: <dewar.843335145@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 184488548
references: <01bba50c$7c1a2760$dc014dc6@MountainNet> <51o7nh$5vl@cf01>
 <Dy0xBw.A1u@thomsoft.com>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-09-21T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


I assume the integer square root problem was an assignment anyway, so
I am not about to provide the obvious answer, but Keith said

"You can convert the argument to a floating-point type, take the square
root, and convert back to an integer type, but that may lose precision
in some cases.  Also, I think an integer square root operation typically
truncates rather than rounding (for example, sqrt(99) is 9, not 10).
Ada 95 provides a 'Truncation attribute (see RM95-A.5.3) -- but again,
watch out for loss of precision (sqrt(9.0) *might* return something like
2.9999999; also, many 32-bit integers cannot be represented exactly in
32-bit floating-point)."

In fact, the square root of 9 must be exactly 3.
dp