OpenEuphoria

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 ......