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From: silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec
Subject: DEC math libraries
Message-ID: <2492@hub.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 89 17:25:21 GMT
Sender: news@hub.UUCP
Organization: UC, Santa Barbara. Physics Computer Services
Lines: 13

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During the 'workstation wars' in our dept. , prospective buyers of stations
have been doing lots of benchmarking.  We have received various complaints
about the Decstation libraries AND some complaints cross ref'd to the
standard VMS libraries.   Some of the math routines return results which
have been criticized (e.g. returning 0 instead of an error when evaluating
sqrt(-1) or similarly when evaluating pow(-1,<fractional exponent>)

Now I know that DEC systems, VMS in particular, have been used in
scientific computing for a long time.  Are these behaviours
'unacceptable oversights' or just 'features'???