Re: Floating Point Number Problem (Re: Swarm Futures re-cap

[Andy Cleary]

At 06:11 PM 10/16/2002 +0100:
> Whilst I agree with Andy Cleary's point that worrying about floating point 
> arithmetic should be the domain of only a privileged few,

"privileged" is hardly the word I'd use here... "damned", "tortured", 
"unfortunate", etc., come to mind before "privileged".

;-)

> it's clear that there is a best practice issue here. Just as with such 
> things as random number generation and scheduling, it is a best practice 
> issue that most Swarm modellers will not want to trouble themselves with, 
> which is what makes me wonder if Swarm should have a library dealing with 
> floating point arithmetic properly somehow.

Really, this is what the IEEE standard is supposed to provide. That it 
doesn't in practice is largely a function of the fact that this is just a 
*hard* subject, and may not really even be "solvable"... I wouldn't expect 
the oversubscribed Swarm development community to be able to solve this if 
IEEE didn't.

Andy




                 ==================================
  Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
  esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
  please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
  body of the message.
                 ==================================