Ahmed Talaat writes: > By the way, I ran the java, and C code, and I found differences in > the results of both programs in the range of 2 to 3 minutes.
These differences seem harmless at first, but at unpredictable times/locations, they accumulate into tens of minutes. I remember the old ITL version 0.5 had a problem like this which was caused by over simplified formulas not counting the small numbers causing a havoc of unpredictable, well hidden, and wrong results. > Going through the debugger, I found out that this difference is > coming from the accumulation of tiny differences between the > results of the trigonometric functions in the C vs Java JVM. This > is one more thing that I am not sure what to do about it. > In the next ITL (ie 0.7) I'm hoping to address part of this issue by providing a test script with various results and a DEBUG mode to allow pinpointing bugs within the ITL's future versions, and also to allow programs/ports to other languages to be as bug free as possible and compare results. I doubt that this would help in your case, though. > And finaly, comparing the results of either the C or Java code to > the one or two ready made prayer programs on my PC, again they are > all different. > > I live in Dubai, and in the past few months, I found that all the > masjeeds have now installed an electronic clock that shows the 5 > prayer times, according to which they operate. Again, I compared > the values on their clock to any of the current program, and I > found that they are different. So, I really do not know which is > the most accurate program, or may be there is none at the moment. > This could mean many things. For example: human error and software bugs; rounding errors; being biased to a certain Fiqh by default or results tainted to a certain location; perpetual calendars, or old calculation theories in the ever changing universe..etc...etc. Any or all these factors could in fact contribute to producing different/wrong results. The ITL prayer library does try to overcome some of these issues at least. This is not the case with the other tools that I have tested or read about, and some of them even try to do the opposite. Salaam, Thamer Mahmoud
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