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From: gstone@gemini.syd.dms.CSIRO.AU (Glenn Stone)
Subject: Re: The book I want to buy
In-Reply-To: radford@cs.toronto.edu's message of 19 Dec 95 15:34:10 GMT
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>>>>> "Radford" == Radford Neal <radford@cs.toronto.edu> writes:
In article <95Dec19.103050edt.1073@neuron.ai.toronto.edu> radford@cs.toronto.edu (Radford Neal) writes:


    Radford> In article <4b5gqf$1vj@cloner2.ix.netcom.com>, Jive
    Radford> Dadson <jdadson@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

    >>> One statistician even expressed to me the opinion that C was
    >>> completely inappropriate for numerical computation.
    >>  Impossible. Anything you can do in FORTRAN you can do in
    >> C. Show me a counter-example.

    Radford> Sadly, any numerical algorithm that makes extensive use
    Radford> of complex numbers *is* a lot harder to program in C than
    Radford> in Fortran (though it is, of course, *possible* to write
    Radford> such programs in C).

I think another reason used to be that C would coerce everything to
double to do calcultions, even if all the variables used were single
precision. Loss of this control was seen as a bad thing by many
numerical programmers. This may have been fixed by ANSI C, I don't
really know.

-- 


 Glenn Stone
 CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics
 Locked Bag 17, North Ryde, NSW 2113
 Phone:+61 2 325 3216, Fax:+61 2 325 3200
 Glenn.Stone@dms.csiro.au
 http://www.dms.CSIRO.AU/~gstone
--


 Glenn Stone
 CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics
 Locked Bag 17, North Ryde, NSW 2113
 Phone:+61 2 325 3216, Fax:+61 2 325 3200
 Glenn.Stone@dms.csiro.au
 http://www.dms.CSIRO.AU/~gstone
