Are the floating point routines on my machine broken?

Joseph S. D. Yao jsdy at hadron.UUCP
Fri Jan 2 22:50:28 AEST 1987


One of the few values of teaching Fortran to programmers
was that invariably, eventually, students would be taught
about round-off error.  In C, we rarely think that someone
might use a float as a loop control variable.  If one needs
a float value iterated, one should use the old Fortran trick:
	int i;
	float f;

	for (i = 0; i < 30; i += 2) {
		f = i / 10.0;
		...
	}

[Do  n o t  flame me for not using 0:15:1;;f=i/5.0;.  This
 valuation makes it more obvious to the casual reader what
 conversion was done; and the arithmetic is obvious!]
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}
			jsdy at hadron.COM (not yet domainised)



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