Re: [boost] Ann: Floating Point Utilities Review starts today

From: Johan Råde (rade_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-02-26 14:47:11

John Phillips wrote:

> I am also concerned about merging it into the MathTools library. That is 
> certainly where it belongs in a logical sense, 

I'm not so sure about that.
Mathematics deals with real numbers.
Computer science deals with floating point numbers.
Ask a typical mathematician what a NaN, denormal number or negative zero is,
and you are most likely to get a blank stare.

 From a purely logical point of view it makes sense to have a separate floating point library,
just as there is a separate integer library.

A more pragmatic reason to keep the floating point functions together with the proper math functions
(exponential functions, trig functions, special functions, statistical distributions etc.)
is that in TR1 both are declared in the header <cmath>.

--Johan