[Haskell-cafe] Sinus in Haskell

Dan Piponi dpiponi at gmail.com
Fri Nov 9 15:00:42 EST 2007


On Nov 9, 2007 11:30 AM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at gmail.com> wrote:
> More generally, this is due to the fact that floating-point numbers can only
> have finite precision

This popped up on reddit recently:
http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/transcendental_meditation .
Interestingly, AMD did apparently figure out how to reduce modulo 2*pi
much more accurately but doing the right thing broke too many
applications. So it's not quite as simple as "floating-point numbers
can only have finite precision", the errors are worse than they need
to be. (But I haven't read the K5 paper and so this information is all
second hand.)
--
Dan


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