Strange math behaviour... could someone explain this ?

[Alex Tweedly]

Richard Gaskin wrote:

>
> One man's "artifact" is another man's "bug". :)
>
> The original poster never specified that it was a Rev bug, 

The *original* poster (jbv) didn't, but Jonathan (to whom I was 
replying) did. At least, he said that Rev did this, and he said (in an 
earlier email) that it was a software bug - so I claim that adds up to 
saying it was a Rev bug.

> and you've shown that the anomaly lies outside of Rev.
>
> Computers are the servants of humans, not the other way around.

You wish !!

>
> If a computer system is designed in such a way that it no longer 
> serves its masters faithfully by honoring things like the explicit 
> order of exectution, it's commonly called a "bug", and it's usually up 
> to another human to come in an fix it.
>
> Whether the fault lies with Rev or the microprocessor, the anwer of 
> 179 is logically incorrect.  It may be understandable, but 
> understanding why it's giving an incorrect answer doesn't change the 
> answer. :)
>
You might get Rev to introduce a workaround (e.g. by changing the 
effective meaning of trunc() to be "round at some ;eve; of precision 
that will do what I *want*, and then truncate", as Mark suggested) - but 
I fear that only leads to someone, some day in the future open a BZ to 
say that Rev gets a different answer to the same calculation than 95% of 
the installed base of  languages).

Bring BCD , that's what I say .... :-)

-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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