e vs exp()?

[Paul Rubin]

"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
> What was your basic approach?  Power series?  Rational function?
> Continued fraction? ???
> http://functions.wolfram.com/ElementaryFunctions/Power/
> gives 343 formulas (many only relevant to complex domain) but doesn't
> seem to indicate which Mathematica actually uses (trade secret I
> presume).

Mathematica has to work to arbitrary precision and would use totally
different methods than what a fixed-precision routine would use.

See "Numerical Recipes" by Press, Teukolsky, et al, for a reasonably
digestible explanation of how to do this stuff.  Note that true
numerics gurus have some problems with this book, but it will at least
give you an idea of what's going on.