Subject: Re: [boost] floating point FUD
From: Barend Gehrels (barend_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-01-24 13:56:29
>
> This looks like fixed-point support will really become "mainstream" soon. How is this related to C++ and the idea of a Boost fixed-point library?
>
>
John Maddock wrote:
>> FP algorithms are all about accumulation of error, aren't they? Would be
>> nice to have some kind of debugging facility (integrated with the code),
>> that somehow keeps track of all kinds of error bounds/measures you're
>> interested in.
>
> I've experimented with that - a "dual precision" type - basically a
> class that evaluates every expression it's subject to at two different
> precisions - say double and with an arbitrary precision type, and then
> optionally prints out the accumulated error. The idea is one can then
> step through code, or else set a break when the accumulated error
> reaches some threshold, and see where the error is coming from in the
> algorithm. That's the theory anyway, in practice I've found good old
> fashioned pen and paper analysis of the algorithm is often as good...
>
I encountered the TTMath library recently, http://www.ttmath.org/ttmath.
Is it already discussed within the context of Boost? It is a templated
library, head-only where mantissa and exponent of a big-number-library
can be set as template parameters, it is almost like a Boost library...
I used TTmath figuring out a problem within segment intersection, all
numeric types gave me different results, including Excel and spatial
databases, and I didn't have any clue of what the real real result
should look like (even GMP and CLN differed...). But this library helped me.
Regards, Barend