Re: It's a bug? Re: Strange problem
- Posted by Kat <gertie at ZEBRA.NET> Mar 19, 2000
- 433 views
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jiri Babor" <J.Babor at GNS.CRI.NZ> To: <EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU> Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2000 7:33 PM Subject: Re: It's a bug? Re: Strange problem > Kat wrote: > > >> I have heard this one so many times I am getting a bit curious too: > >> what is exactly your problem that requires higher precision than to > >> about 16 decimal places? Even Bill Gate$' fabulous wealth can be > >> expressed quite accurately, to the last cent in fact, using just 16 > >> digits. That's plenty astronomical to me! jiri > > > >But when i measure plant cell nuclii radius in parsecs, 16 digits isn't > >enough. In fact, only string math will be accurate enough, since you can use > >as many digits as you wish, 16^16 if you wish. Sounds like a math library is > >needed. > >shrug > > > >Kat > > What's your point? Advocacy of silly units? I thought it was *you* who > moaned about the wasteful manner of string storage in Euphoria just > recently. (Btw, I happen to agree with you on that one. In fact I > would go to the extreme of asking Rob to discard his dogmatic blinkers > and give us fast, fixed size element arrays, directly mappable to > memory. 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 byte elements would suit me fine.) I'm not going to guess what units people are using, i am pointing out that you can't guess either, or foresee what the next person will need. You mentioned (economics) money, i mentioned (astronomy) parsecs, someone else may be figureing out (physics) strong force/weak force interaction from within an atom to across the universe. Why limit the number of digits that can be dealt with in a math problem? You automatically close off Eu from some domains when you do. Besides the accuracy issue. String math isn't going to eat a lot of memory, 32bits per digit is all. Maybe it will eat a lot of memory if you have a lot of numbers to munch on. What it will consume a lot of is time, since there is no conversion to binary, none of the math hardware can be used, it's all case or if_then digit-by-digit comparisons and lots of recursion. > Tossing a kat among the pidgeons... jiri /me growls at the flapping dinner ......