Hello Bob and Kai!

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 5:41 PM, Kai Tietz <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2011/4/30 Bob Delaney <[email protected]>:
>>
>> On Apr 30, 2011, at 10:15 AM, K. Frank wrote:
>>
>>> I get:
>>>
>>>   C:\>gcc -o pow_test pow_test.c
>>>
>>>   C:\>pow_test
>>>   2.20000000000000017764^3.10000000000000008882 = 11.52153412678571875460
>>
>>
>> Victor Shoup's NTL and my own fp, to 22 digit accuracy, give:
>>
>> 2.20000000000000017764^3.10000000000000008882 = 11.52153412678571783832
>>
>> so your result is accurate to only 16 digits. Your

This is exactly what I would expect (short of looking at the actual
binary representation).  An IEEE double is 64 bits, with a 52-bit
mantissa, which, with the "implicit" bit, gives 53 bits of precision.
This gives just under 16 decimal digits of precision, which is what
you see.

>>
>> 2.20000000000000000004^3.09999999999999999991 = 11.52153412678571414718
>>
>> should be:
>>
>> 2.20000000000000000004^3.09999999999999999991 = 11.52153412678571414732
>>
>> so your result is accurate to about 20 digits.

As I understand it, gcc defines long double as the x87 80-bit floating point
number.  This has a 64-bit mantissa, and I believe that it does not use an
implicit bit, so this gives slightly more than 19 decimal digits of precision,
again consistent with your result.

>>
>> Bob
>
> Well, what is to be expected as we used here in test application an
> %.20F. By specifying here a %.40F its calculated result is
> 11.5215341267857141471786519559827866032720 and it is has binary
> identity for what gmp calculates for 80-bit IEEE 754 floating point.
> Which means for our purposes in gcc, it has right accuracy.

(Kai's comment seems to confirm that gcc's long double is, indeed,
the 80-bit floating-point number.)

> Kai

Thanks to all for the insight.


K. Frank

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