[Haskell-cafe] Sinus in Haskell

[Henning Thielemann]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 ajb at spamcop.net wrote:

> Quoting jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr:
>
> > Then, a *rational* approximation gives you the same precision with
> > less coeffs. Nowadays the division is not sooo much more expensive
> > than the multiplication, so the efficiency doesn't suffer much.
>
> It might not cost much in the way of time, but it might complicate the
> implementation a lot.  Using polynomials only probably uses a smaller
> number of transistors, disspiate less power and for all I know might be
> easier to parallelise than the alternatives.

I guess that the general answer to the question for the best algorithm is:
"It depends ..." If your architecture (on hardware or machine code level)
has no or slow multiplication, you will use an algorithm that avoids
multiplications, same for division and so on.