[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is logBase right?

[Lennart Augustsson]

I don't really care much one way or the other, but since C (math.h)
provides functions for base 2 and base 10 with some additional
accuracy, I wouldn't mind using them.  For a constant base I'd expect
the extra comparison to be constant folded, so that's ok.  For a
non-constant base there would be a small penalty.

  -- Lennart

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Henning
Thielemann<lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>
>> You're absolutely right.  It would be easy to change logBase to have
>> special cases for, say, base 2 and base 10, and call the C library
>> functions for those.  In fact, I think it's a worth while change,
>> since it's easy and get's better results for some cases.
>
> I think, the current implementation should left as it is. For fractional
> bases, no one would easily detect such imprecise results and report them as
> problem. So, it seems like people need a logarithm of integers, so they
> should be supplied with a special logarithm function for integers. For the
> other use cases, where 10 as base is one choice amongst a continuous set of
> rational numbers it would not be a problem to give the imprecise result. In
> the general case I would not accept a speed loss due to a check against 2
> and 10 as base.
>
> In dynamically typed languages like Python this might be different, because
> their users might not care much about types. It may not be important for
> them, whether a number is an integer or a floating point number that is
> accidentally integral. However, Python distinguishes between these two kinds
> of integers, but only dynamically.
>