Floating-point non-exactness

[Andrew Koenig]

In article <26722 at pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>, hilfingr at tully.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Hilfinger) writes:

> Assume the machine rounds
> literals deterministically to the nearest representable FP number.

An optimistic assumption indeed.  To do that, you need unbounded
precision in your input conversion routine.  It's hard enough to
do floating point input conversion that always gives you one
of the two nearest neighbors of the input value.
-- 
				--Andrew Koenig
				  ark at europa.att.com