From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f8362,c7637cfdf68e766 X-Google-Attributes: gidf8362,public X-Google-Thread: 107079,c7637cfdf68e766 X-Google-Attributes: gid107079,public X-Google-Thread: 109d8a,c7637cfdf68e766 X-Google-Attributes: gid109d8a,public X-Google-Thread: f43e6,c7637cfdf68e766 X-Google-Attributes: gidf43e6,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7637cfdf68e766 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: floating point comparison Date: 1997/08/08 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 262992146 References: <33E61497.33E2@pseserv3.fw.hac.com> <33E6D359.3EF4@imbi.uni-freiburg.de> <33E74A62.53E2@pseserv3.fw.hac.com> <5sar4r$t7m$1@cnn.nas.nasa.gov> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,sci.math.num-analysis,comp.software-eng,comp.theory,sci.math Date: 1997-08-08T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Dave Sparks said <> The interesting thing is that most people would agree with this statement if you susbvtitute almost any other technical aspect of computing for "floating-point", but when it comes to floating-point, there seems to always be a fair number of people who are seduced into believing it is false for floating-point, probably because: a) syntactically, the use of floating-point presents no problems b) there is a simple (but wrong) semantic model -- real arithmetic c) using this wrong semantic model often works well enough The trouble is that, as I and others have said in this thread before, telling when c) might not be true is very hard. Note that we have not had contributions in this thread that say: "I know all about that numerical analysis stuff, but don't worry, you don't need to know it, just go straight ahead and use floating-point without worrying about it." I think that says something .... :-)