Draft "Unsafe fp optimizations" project description.

dewar@gnat.com dewar@gnat.com
Sun Aug 5 05:33:00 GMT 2001


<<I think what Toon meant was something like: if you throw all the
possible distinct values for a given FP representation into a sack, and
pick the operands at random from the sack, there's roughly a 50/50
chance that B*C will overflow or underflow.
>>

I agree that's what he meant, but that is entirely wrong, the proportion
of numbers that overflow is far far smaller. Remember we are talking about
floating-point values here, not real values. There are as many fpt 
numbers with an exponent of 1 as there are with an exponent of 100 :-)



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