In article <550bbfc1$0$13010$c3e8da3$54964...@news.astraweb.com>, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> I cannot remember the details, and I don't have my copy of the Apple > Standard Numerics manual here to look it up Amongst the details you don't remember is the correct name :-) It was Standard Apple Numerics Environment (SANE). I think I still have my copy of the manual somewhere. > If you find that hard to believe, it's because you're spoiled by the > astonishing success of IEEE-754 floating point arithmetic. There's two things we're spoiled by. IEEE-754 is, of course, one of them. But, more than that, are good math libraries built on top of it. One of the truly unappreciated things to come out of the early BSD Unix releases was a C math library written by people who understood (and worried about) things like accurate FP calculations, rounding, corner cases, and all that gunk. Sure, I could sit down with a C compiler and the Wikipedia Gamma function article and code up gamma(). It would work well enough to get a decent grade as a homework assignment for Introduction To Programming 101. But, fundamentally, it would be a piece of crap because I know just enough about numerical programming to know that I should leave it to the experts. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
