R help - Sep 2005 - Floating-point arithmetic

Hi Folks,

A recent exchange on the 'octave' list led to the following
paper being cited, which I had not met before:

  What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About
  Floating-Point Arithmetic, by David Goldberg,

originally published in the March, 1991 issue of Computing Surveys.

PDF and HTML versions are widely available on the web (see Google),
e.g. at

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~dws/grouplinks/floating_point_math.pdf

Though over the years I've many times been there, done that,
got bitten by the bugs, and bought the T-shirt [I have one from
Florida depicting a large and joyful mosquito with proboscis
dripping with blood] I still found this a revealing read, written
in a style well-suited to general users of numerical computer
languages.

So I'm writing to bring it to the notice of R users who may not
have come across it.

(And also, maybe, to pre-empt that question that some of you may
have been thinking of asking ... ).

Best wishes to all,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 13-Sep-05                                       Time: 08:30:03
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk
wrote:
> A recent exchange on the 'octave' list led to the following
> paper being cited, which I had not met before:
>
>  What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About
>  Floating-Point Arithmetic, by David Goldberg,
<snip>
>
> So I'm writing to bring it to the notice of R users who may not
> have come across it.
>
> (And also, maybe, to pre-empt that question that some of you may
> have been thinking of asking ... ).
Since the paper is already linked from the relevant R FAQ question, there 
surely wouldn't be any of these ;-)


 	-thomas