Python -- floating point arithmetic

[Adam Skutt]

On Jul 8, 2:00 pm, Stefan Krah <stefan-use... at bytereef.org> wrote:
>
> This whole argument is a misunderstanding. Mark and I argue that correct
> rounding is quite feasible in practice, you argue that you want guaranteed
> execution times and memory usage. This is clear now, but was not so apparent
> in the "impossible" paragraph that Mark responded to.
No, that's what I'm arguing for, though such a feature is important.
I'm pointing out that the feasibility of correct rounding is entirely
dependent on what you're doing.  For IEEE-754 double, it's feasible
for the elementary functions if you can tolerate intermediate
calculations that are more than twice as large as your double in the
corner cases.  Certainly, for a single calculation, this is
acceptable, but at how many calculations is it no longer acceptable?

Adam