Question on valid transformations for cbrt

[Geoff Keating]

Roger Sayle <roger@eyesopen.com> writes:

> i.e. cbrt(-29.7) = -3.1 but pow(-29.7,1.0/3.0) => EDOM.

one reason for this is because 1.0 / 3.0, as a double, gets rounded to
6004799503160661 / 2 ^ 54, and so the result of the pow() is imaginary
and not representable as a 'double'.  (If we'd used base-3 arithmetic,
pow() could always provide a result with negative inputs.)

(This also means the same transformations with sqrt() will usually be
safe.)

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@geoffk.org>