Bug in floating-point addition: is anyone else seeing this?

[Dave Parker]

On May 21, 3:19 pm, "Dan Upton" <up... at virginia.edu> wrote:
> The fact is, sometimes it's better to get it fast and be good enough,
> where you can use whatever methods you want to deal with rounding
> error accumulation.

I agree.

I also think that the precision/speed tradeoff should be under user
control -- not at the whim of the compiler writer.  So, for example,
if a user says:

      Set realdecimaldigits to 10.

then it's okay to use hardware double precision, but if they say:

      Set realdecimaldigits to 100.

then it's not.  The user should always be able to specify the
precision and the rounding mode, and the program should always provide
correct results to those specifications.