Re: [Axiom-developer] differences

[Waldek Hebisch]

> Ok, the problem isn't in axiom and it appears that it isn't in GCL.
> I built the same GCL sources (no axiom) on redhat 9 and fedora 5.
> The result of
> 
> (cos (acos 0.7)) on Redhat is 0.69999999999....96
> (cos (acos 0.7)) on Fedora is 0.70000000000...07
> 
> so the problem change is likely somewhere in a system library
> that gets linked into GCL. Since every other combination of
> sins, cos, logs, exps, etc ends up with 0.69999.... I have
> to conclude that there is a very minor bug in the Fedora lib.
> 

I see the first result on 32-bit machines and the second one
on 64-bit ones.  AFAICS the difference is in least significant bit.
Since Lisp does not specify accuracy it is hard to call such difference
a bug.  To repeatable results one have to sacrifce some speed.
The are long flame wars related to this, see for example:

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=323

My presonal attitude is: do not trust in least significant digit
(it may differ due to different rounding).

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden