Re: normalized ALF (Assotiated Legendre Function)

[Ben Abbott]

On Wednesday, February 13, 2008, at 11:02AM, "Ben Abbott" <address@hidden> 
wrote:
>On Wednesday, February 13, 2008, at 09:58AM, "Marco Caliari" <address@hidden> 
>wrote:
>>I discovered that the warning is misleading. Consider
>>
>>legendre(151,0)
>>
>>The last entry is -Inf and the script "should" returns a warning (you 
>>should replace scale == inf with abs(scale) == inf). But, there is no 
>>instability: the value -Inf is "right", in the sense that it is too large 
>>in magnitude to be represented. Now consider
>>
>>legendre(151,eps)
>>
>>Again a warning (due to the check on a and b), but, again, no instability.
>>
>>Moreover, Matlab has no warnings and it is less robust. Consider
>>
>>legendre(151,-0.9)
>>
>>in Matlab and with the script now enclosed. To conclude, I would suggest 
>>to leave the warnings out.
>>
>>Marco
>>
>
>ok.
>
>I'll begin adding some tests and include on for "legendre(151,0) == Inf".
>
>If you have any other good examples, feel free to post them!
>
>Ben
>

A couple of tests ...

%!test
%! result = legendre (151, 0);
%! ## Don't compare to "-Inf" since it would fail on 64 bit systems.
%! assert (result(end) < -1.7976e308 && all (isfinite (result(1:end-1))));

%!test
%! result = legendre (150, 0);
%! ## This agrees with Matlab's result.
%! assert (result(end), 3.7532741115719e+306, 0.0000000000001e+306)