[Haskell-cafe] Confused about logBase

[MarLinn]

Hi,

I discovered that in base /logBase/, the functions representing 
arbitrary logarithms, are defined in terms of two applications of /log/. 
/log/, the functions representing the natural logarithm, just pass 
responsibility on to some primitives. That is fine, mathematically 
speaking. But from an implementation standpoint, I wonder why one would 
do that.

The logarithm that should be the fastest and the most precise one to 
approximate by a cpu should be the one to base two. In fact if one 
already has a floating point representation, it should be almost 
ridiculously easy to compute from the exponent.

I suppose it's probably a good idea to use primitive functions for the 
harder cases to get some speed-up. What I don't see is why the choice 
seems to have been an /xor/ instead of an /and/.

I am by absolutely no means an expert on these things, so I am probably 
missing something here. Is there actually a good reason for this choice? 
For example will ghc optimize such logarithms anyway?

Cheers,

MarLinn

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