Re: logarithms on ada

[dsmith@clark.net (Doug Smith)]

In article <E6Lt30.1Fy@world.std.com>, bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) wrote:

> 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

I've heard education described as a sequence of telling half-truths.
There is no reason to get into the details of Ada model numbers in
the class-room until it comes up or the teacher feels the student is
ready. Plot a log graph. It will look OK. Learn to set loop bounds
using inequalities, when appropriate, to deal with inexact computations.

(Graduate school took all of my assumptions about numbers and tossed
 them out the window! I could just shoot some of those brilliant
 mathematicians that thought it was so clever to "draw outside of
 the lines".)

Now when it's time to program that flight control module, that
engineer had better understand model numbers or let someone else
do it!

Doug
<dsmith@clark.net>