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From: aduncan@rhea.trl.oz.au (Allan Duncan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Implementation of pow(3m) function
Message-ID: <2055@trlluna.trl.oz>
Date: 9 Aug 90 22:16:32 GMT
References: <17301@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Sender: root@trlluna.trl.oz
Lines: 16

From article <17301@haddock.ima.isc.com>, by karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer):
> *Some* Unix implementations do.  I have observed others in which roundoff
> error causes (int)pow(2.0, 3.0) to return 7; this is an excellent reason not
> to use pow() when you want integer exponentiation.  (I myself would prefer a
> new operator, `*^'.  I wrote an essay on this a couple of years ago.)

Ahh!  Shades of Fortran!  This is one of the reasons that ancient
language still keeps alive and well.  I find C's handling of mixed mode
arithmetic a little less than satisfactory, and the need to write
everything as functions obscures the mathematical form of an expression.
I might be forced to look at C++ if I am to throw over Fortran.

Allan Duncan	ACSnet	a.duncan@trl.oz
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