[Haskell-cafe] fast fractional part of floating point number - modf?

[John Meacham]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 01:08:49AM +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> Is there a fast and reliable way to compute the fraction of a floating
> point number?

no, and this has bothered me to the point I consider it a bug in the
language spec that all 'rounding' style functions give back an integral
type. These sort of operations are often used on floating point values
when you want the same type out you put in, and in particular you want
it to handle things like infinities and nan's properly which the
conversion through integral does not (plus, these usually coorespond to
a single machine instruction so are more 'primitive' in a sense and thus
better building blocks for a RealFrac class).

To alleviate this I added the following to the RealFrac class in jhc

-- TODO Doubles
class  (Real a, Fractional a) => RealFrac a  where
    ....
    ...
    -- new stuff added by jhc
    properFractionf   :: a -> (a,a)
    truncatef, roundf :: a -> a
    ceilingf, floorf  :: a -> a

    truncatef x       =  m  where (m,_) = properFractionf x
    roundf x          =  fromInteger (round x)
    ceilingf x        =  if r > 0 then n + 1 else n
                        where (n,r) = properFractionf x
    floorf x          =  if r < 0 then n - 1 else n
                        where (n,r) = properFractionf x


the meaning should be clear, they perform the same operation as their
non f counterparts but maintain the same type.

        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈