(j3.2006) J3/09-292 - J3 Fortran interp letter ballot#19 - due19-Oct-2009
Van Snyder
Van.Snyder
Mon Oct 19 20:56:12 EDT 2009
On Mon, 2009-10-19 at 17:47 -0700, Malcolm Cohen wrote:
> Bill Long wrote:
> > I believe that HYPOT was added as part of the "lets support C's libm
> > functions". The added feature of HYPOT is the suppression of typical
> > optimizations so as to avoid overflow or underflow. I suspect few will use
> > it, but those who do really want this behavior.
>
> In which case they will want to avoid C hypot().
>
> Yes, the very purpose of C hypot() is to avoid unnecessary over/underflow. From
> bitter experience I can attest that hypot() has not been reliable in this. Over
> time the number of bad ones has decreased, but I ran across another one that
> gave a spurious overflow only a month or two ago!
>
> So my experience is that a C programmer who requires
> (a) no spurious over/under flow calculating sqrt(a**2+b**2)
> (b) code that runs everywhere without modification or ifdef
> will have to write a safe version himself.
Now that we have C interoperability, the C programmer who requires...
could write a Fortran procedure that uses CABS and call that from C.
> Cheers,
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