[Haskell-cafe] floating point operations and representation

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 12:59:09PM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> foreign import ccall unsafe "math.h log10" log10 :: Double -> Double
> 
> since in ghc CDouble and Double are identical.
> 
> It's a bit sloppier, but shouldn't cause any trouble.  And I've no
> idea how realToFrac is implemented, but would worry about it behaving
> oddly... for instance when given NaNs.

Yes. 'realToFrac' is inherently pretty broken and should be avoided
whenever possible. It is not all all obvious to me what the correct
primitive should be.. but we really should do something better for
haskell'. relying on RULES firing as ghc currently does doesn't seem
ideal..

hmm.. maybe a 'FloatMax' type and have 'fromFloatMax' and 'toFloatMax'
in 'Fractional' and 'Real' respectively? hmm.. hc has 'fromDouble' and
'toDouble' there, but jhc also supports a 'Float128' type (when the
underlying hardware does). so this still isn't quite right.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈