bhyde@inmet.UUCP (03/17/84)
#R:sdccs5:-116100:inmet:5800046:000:385 inmet!bhyde Mar 16 10:46:00 1984 We could give every body an address space at birth. If every thing you did over your life, computes wize, would consume space in this address space how much would you sign up for? What is a man's rightful address space? If I'm going to stream all of my universe into my dynabook it better be pretty big! How big an address space do other entities deserve? The feds, GM, your cat?
johna@haddock.UUCP (03/20/84)
#R:sdccs5:-116100:haddock:13200010:000:449 haddock!johna Mar 19 12:32:00 1984 >> Floating point ? I don't do too much crunching, but I would expect >> 64 bits of double precision on a 32 bit machine would give you plenty >> of precision. Floating point gives great RANGE but precision is not its strong suit. 64 bit IEEE floating point has a 53 bit mantissa, giving approx. 17 digits. Any number 10^-17 < x < 10^17 will be exact, but anything else will only be an approximation. decvax!ima!haddock!johna
accuncg@ecsvax.UUCP (03/23/84)
Re: haddock.133 It is NOT true that "any number 10^-17 <x <10^17 will be exact". If the inter- nal representation is binary, then ONLY numbers whose fractional part has a denominator which is a (negative) power of 2 will be exact. All others (includ-ing 1/3, 1/5, 1/10) will be rounded or truncated approximations. T. W. Hildebrandt UNC-Greensboro decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!accuncg