On 5/31/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Conclusion: In 32 years, I had to use it once but it's nice to know...

my conclusion is that the limited kerf repertoire of J's tolerance has
made it something pretty easy to ignore, ie of limited utility. In
graphics we are constantly dealing with kerfs of varying scales. It
would be nice in that, and i am sure many other contexts, to have the
machinery of interval arithmetic available.

~greg

On May 31, 2006, at 9:01 AM, Ralph G Selfridge wrote:

The sort of crazy results you can get if tolerence is not identically zero is a 
squence of numbers, each of which 'equals' its neighbours but the first and 
last are not equal.

Paul Berry tells this story:

In an early talk Ken was explaining the advantages of tolerant
comparison. A member of the audience asked incredulously, ?Surely you
don?t mean that when A=B and B=C, A may not equal C?? Without skipping
a beat, Ken replied, ?Any carpenter knows that!? and went on to the
next question.
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