Rev math

[Victor Eijkhout]

>There are three directions a change might occur.  The simplest is 
>simply more precision.  I think this most likely should a change 
>occur.  I wouldn't be surprised if representation changed from 8 
>byte fp to 16 byte fp in the next five years.  The second is the use 
>of a decimal point.  This is not likely to occur if it involves a 
>decrease in precision or a multifold decrease in speed.  (It is 
>commonly assumed that this requires a decimal internal 
>representation such as BCD; this is not true.)  The third is a 
>paradigm shift such as indefinite precision.  I doubt this will 
>occur.

Actually, there are packages for infinite precision that rr could 
simply link to (doesn't the Gnu Scientific Library have it?). My 
guess is that that would be easier than doubling hte precision. Given 
that we are already using double precision, do chips have native 
instructions for quad precision? It could be that that would be quite 
hard to add.
-- 
Victor Eijkhout <eijkhout at cs.utk.edu>
tel: 865 974 9308 (W), 865 673 6998 (H), 865 974 8296 (F)
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~eijkhout/