Patches to 1.8.0p4 to add Bessel functions for those that have 'em

ruby-talk
21

In article 1a8fc4a0.0308040614.3902c0ed@posting.google.com,

bbense+comp.lang.ruby.Aug.02.03@telemark.slac.stanford.edu wrote in message news:bggl6e$d94$2@news.Stanford.EDU…

    • The computational results are all “0” as well, they way to test
      floating point computations for equality is to see if the
      absolute value of their difference is less than EPS. Frankly,
      I don’t understand how this comes as a surprise to people.
      You should not be allowed to use the / operator unless you
      understand this.
    • Booker C. Bense

I don’t understand the reason why you show such vanity, or why you
need to make fun of previous posts.

_ I guess the smiley was missing. I don’t mean to offend, but
I’ve seen this topic come up over and over again on this list.
It makes me wonder, do they no longer teach floating point in CS,
or are there just that many people coming to programming with
no educational background? Certainly if you teach yourself
programming through various books on scripting languages
you won’t run across this issue until it’s too late.

It’s a fact that numerical analysis
is a difficult domain, and unless you are able to explain each line
of code in Netlib (for example :-), you shouldn’t “be allowed to”
post such things.

_ Well, it’s been quite some time since I got paid to do that,
but at one point that was my job… Unfortunately, you can’t
make much money doing that.

In fact it is even funny to read your answer. I don’t think it’s
a good idea to test equality that way. It will work in some cases,
whene your numbers are near 1.

_ Yes, I was being sloppy, since all the numbers were near zero.
But this does make your point, I know better and I still didn’t
get it right.

I’d rather use a “relative” error,
and sometimes it may be more complicated. It depends on what you
need to compare. Here it’s stupid to test absolute difference, since
the goal was to show why you must not use “a!=b” with floating point
numbers.

_ Sorry you took offense. I certainly don’t mean to lower the
quality of debate on this list. My apologies.

_ Booker C. Bense

···

Jean-Claude Arbaut jcarbaut@sailormoon.com wrote:

22

_ I guess the smiley was missing. I don’t mean to offend, but
I’ve seen this topic come up over and over again on this list.

And on most others as well relating to programming.

It makes me wonder, do they no longer teach floating point in CS,
or are there just that many people coming to programming with
no educational background?

I’ve been a professional programmer (with a CS degree) for a long
time now, and the number of CS grads is far overwhelmed by the
engineering and math grads. Sometimes they get actual programming
schooling, but mostly they get schooling on how to put code into a
computer and run it.

And many, as you surmise, teach themselves.

In any case, few have had any thorough numerical analysis
training/exposure.

Before anyone gets in an uproar, I’m asserting that this is neither
good nor bad, it’s only an observation.

···

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