Joey K Tuttle wrote: > At 07:18 -0500 2006/12/06, John Randall wrote: >>Joey Tuttle writes: >>>In any case, I'm happy to sit back and wait for arbitrary >>>precision/accuracy facilities to be introduced in J. >> >>Symbolic languages such as Maple and Mathematica have arbitrary >>precision, but you hit a switch to do native floating-point >>calculation when you want speed. >> > > Of course, as the case with 123x currently, I presume that a > switch to (surely slower) arbitrary precision would continue > to be required. That is what I'm happy to wait for...
Fair enough, but you still pay the price for the slower simplification/evaluation model anyway. That is why Maple and Mathematica are not used for serious numerical calculation, except as front ends to standard libraries like LAPACK. Even with arbitrary precision, pi is not representable exactly, since you are still limited to rational numbers. If argument reduction is used in calculating sin, it is quite likely that sin(pi) is not 0: you need symbolic representation (or luck) for that. Best wishes, John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
