Numerics question: reading floating point constants

Tim Olson tim at io.com
Mon Apr 24 23:11:41 UTC 2006


On Apr 10, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:

> stéphane ducasse wrote:
>> Do you know a good book or lectures on the problems related to number
>> representation in our nice
>> computers?
>
> Besides Clinger's paper on reading floats accurately, there's a
> companion by Burger and Dybvig on "Printing Floating Point Numbers
> Quickly and Accurately": http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/28233.html
> http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/FP-Printing-PLDI96.ps.gz

I used this algorithm when I wrote the Float>>absPrintOn:base: and 
Float>>absPrintExactlyOn:base: routines which are used for printing 
Floats in Squeak.  However, I never re-vamped the Number>>readFrom: 
routines which read floats.  The read routines can use the same basic 
method for generating exact values as the print routines do (the bases 
are just swapped).

	-- Tim Olson




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