Re: [boost] accurate sum accumulator (kahan)

Subject: Re: [boost] accurate sum accumulator (kahan)
From: Tomas Puverle (tomas.puverle_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-26 15:09:41

> PS As for naming, I'd vote for sum and accurate_sum (to keep backward
compatibility).

Please don't call them "accurate_sum" and "quick_sum" (as proposed by someone 
else).

There are several different types of "accurate sum" algorithms with different
runtime trade-offs.

'sum' in itself is as accurate as it gets if all the numbers are normalized 
in some way.  As this is frequently required for the overall computation, it 
would be wasteful to compute the secondary accumulator.  There are other 
scenarios where a plain 'sum' is good enough.

Thanks,

Tom