On 2003-08-22 at 18:39+0200 Konrad Hinsen wrote: > I am getting a bit worried about the usability of Haskell > for numerical work. The Haskell 98 report states that > floating literals are represented as a conversion from > Rational, which means that the literal is first converted > to a Rational. I can't find anything in the Haskell report > that states how this conversion should take place, and to > what precision it should be correct. It could be made > correct to any precision as Rationals are represented > using Integers, but at least Hugs doesn't do that. By > experimenting with some particular cases, I found that its > internal Rational representation is even less accurate > than the precision of Double permits, which means that it > is impossible to specify literals to the full precision of > Double. GHC behaved fine in my tests. But what can I > safely assume from a Haskell implementation?
You can safely assume that (as it says in its documentation) Hugs is not suitable for numeric work. "proper"� Haskell implementations ought to use conversions that give the best possible accuracy for the final type. J�n [1] not that Hugs isn't proper, but it's just not designed for that. -- J�n Fairbairn [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
