Oh, and please, can you shed some light on the history, why for floating-point math in Squeak, VM using non-standard math lib, which comes with any C compiler, but instead, a portions of separate 3rd party library?
You would be surprised to find out just how much the results of the C compiler libraries differ when it comes to edge cases. I've run the experiment in the past:
Using Python 2.4:
import math math.cos(1.0e32)
WinXP: -0.39929634612021897 LinuxX86: -0.49093671143542561
Thanks for the info. Scary. It is amazing how we can forget this ugly things in the comfort of our images. I remember a talk of dave thomas (VA) and he said that they burned tons of smart people on such issues.
In short, the results *dramatically* vary depending on processor family, processor version, C compiler libraries, and so on. None of the libraries produce cross-platform bit-identical results. fdlibm does.
i see. And it looks like this library used by java vm. It is very strange that Oracle having no interest in maintaining it anymore:
http://mailman.oakapple.net/pipermail/numeric-interest/2010-September/002054...
Strange. May be not for free.
Stef