On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 03:34:04PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote: > On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 02:16:20PM +0200, Theo Buehler wrote: > > It may be somewhat interesting to mention why expm1(x) = exp(x) - 1 and > > log1p(x) = log(1 + x) are provided and what their historical purpose is. > > However, as mlarkin@ put it: are any of our users of exp(3) going to > > seriously be asking themselves "hmm, is OpenBSD's exp compatible with > > BASIC on the HP-71B?" > > The wording change also changes the semantics quite a bit. The old > wording explained where the name came from and what the function does. > The new wording implies somewhat that the functions are obsolete, which > is far from true.
Huh ? "computes the value ... accurately even for tiny arguments". That's quite enough as far as a function description goes. When it does matter, you're pretty much going to lose anyway. You can possibly want to add references to external texts (Art of computer programming, Numerical recipes, or any decent IEEE754 text would do... https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/IEEE754.PDF is probably the best short reference IMO), but if people do floating point stuff without understanding the basics, the manpage isn't really going to help anyway. Losing the full historical explanation of the name is not that big a problem; the names are very much self-explanatory.
