Generalized Lambert W function - premature commit



On 24/05/2012 5:47 AM, Raymond Toy wrote:
> Thanks for the updates.  Everything works now.
>
> It's still a bit troubling that the bigfloat results aren't more 
> consistent.  Perhaps I'll try to track this down.  It could be a bug 
> somewhere.
>
>
>     I have also used  the bigfloat package to remove some duplicate
>     code and there is scope for further improvement.  I needed a
>     bigfloat %e so I added the method to numeric.lisp, based on the
>     code for the %pi method.
>
>
> Looks good.
>
> As an aside, the bigfloat package was intended so that you could use 
> exactly the same code for floats and bigfloats, ignoring issues with 
> constants and epsilon values.  If you run into a case where this is 
> not true, please let me know. (Of course, using the bigfloat package 
> for floats will be slower than just coding the same algorithm for floats.)
>
> Ray
>

I have just checked in a generic version using the bigfloat package.  
Much neater.  I removed the guard digits from the bfloat calcs - it was 
a nasty hack that didn't always work - so the results may change 
slightly.  I will just make a note in the manual that the final digits 
may be wrong, and to suggest users check using higher precision if it 
matters.