The discussion is revisiting a lot of work that was done in the 1950s and 1960s on floating point arithmetic. The gold standard is to accumulate in a double length mantissa. On some architectures that was easy to do. The i386 architecture uses IEEE 754 as far as I am aware (I have not looked at details for a while). This makes it fairly easy to double length accumulate reals, but almost all current s/w uses doubles by default (roughly 15 decimal digits equivalent). This means accumulations have to be done in quad, which wasn't part of the standard toolkit.
If I ever get jhbuild to complete, I may even be willing to try. JN _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list gnumeric-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list