floating-point problems with 5.22.1



On 12/28/10 10:42 AM, Oliver Kullmann wrote:
> On the other hand, the difference of
>
> 4.830986538632788-4.83098653863282 ~ -3.197442310920451e-14
>
> is gigantic (so well, at least to me ;-)) ?
Yes, that is a bit larger than we want.   One solution would be to ask
your lisp vendor to have it signal an error on log(<really big
integer>).   Then the loss of accuracy only happens when there is a big
integer.  

But I can also change the code to do an explicit check for the range
when using gcl and ecl.  That might be ok.
>
> Aha, thus it got slower. So well, it seems we need to lower our
> expectations for some time ...
Not according to your results.  5.22 was 10 sec faster when running
testf1 than 5.21.

But if you look at $float, there is a huge amount of processing before
we get to part that computes the actual log.   I suspect there isn't
much extra caused by the extra computations.

Ray