Re: [pure-lang-users] Yet another quirk with MinGW

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> "Doing floating-point arithmetic is like making sand castles:
> every time you move one, you get a little less sand and a little
> more dirt."  -quoted by Knuth, but I forget who he attributes it to.

Most likely the quote is from Prof. William Kahan, the father of IEEE
754, Turing Award winner and ACM fellow. That's the same guy who also
designed the numeric algorithms powering the legendary HP 10C "Voyager"
series of programmable RPN calculators, so he's very well-known to HP
calculator fans like me. :)

Considering the metaphor, I'd say that the quote is from the
"Mathematics Written in Sand" paper, which is available as a PDF from
Kahan's website at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/. It's been a
while since I read the paper, so I can't say for sure. But it's
recommended reading for everyone dabbling in numeric algorithms.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag