>>>>> "Barton" == Barton Willis <willisb@unk.edu> writes:
Barton> I don't think CL supports setting the floating point
Barton> rounding mode (maybe CMUCL does as an extension); at
Definitely true. Plus getting rounding right on x86 is pretty
difficult with its 80-bit registers.
Barton> least for now, I think it would be okay to have error
Barton> bounds that were almost certainly correct. Really it
I think the difficulty will be how to handle intervals when you're
given just a single number x. You could create an interval
[x*(1-eps), x*(1+eps)] and work with that. The interval package for
cmucl was geared towards handling Lisp's interval types, not real
interval stuff.
Barton> seems that the hard part of doing interval analysis is
Barton> blending an interval type into Maxima. If you still have a
Barton> copy of your code and if you could donate it, I'll look at
Barton> it.
The core of the code was originally written to be completely portable,
but I don't know if I have that anymore. I (or any one else) can pull
out some stuff from cmucl since it's truly public domain.
Barton> The specfun name was inherited from Macsyma.
Perhaps the name should be kept the same for compatibility? Did
Macsyma's specfun include more than just orthogonal polynomials? But
I think the choice is yours.
Ray