Re: demonic numbers !

From: William Bland (news456_at_abstractnonsense.com)
Date: 02/11/05 

Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:29:10 GMT

On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:55:38 +0100, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:

>
> William Bland <news456@abstractnonsense.com> writes:
>> CL-USER> (reduce #'+ (make-list 100 :initial-element 1.0))
>> 100.0+/-5.000001
>
> Oops, it seems you have an error on the error here...

Heh, yeah, maybe I should include an estimate for the error in the error
term too ;-)

Incidentally, I'm not sure if this came across in any of my earlier posts,
but I can't really imagine using this number-with-error-bar thing myself
(or the trick to force reading of floats as rationals), but I *love* the
fact that Lisp allows me to reach into the language and redefine something
so basic. Even if I can't imagine wanting to do it *now*, it's nice to
know I could do it if I ever needed to.

Cheers,
        Bill.