round-off error in std::pow(std::complex<T>, double) in C++11
Marc Glisse
marc.glisse@inria.fr
Fri Jan 25 18:55:00 GMT 2013
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013, Paolo Carlini wrote:
> On 01/25/2013 05:18 PM, Paolo Carlini wrote:
>> On 01/25/2013 04:44 PM, Paolo Carlini wrote:
>>> .. oops, I just noticed what Marc suggested in the PR about changing
>>> pow(const complex<>&, const _Tp&) to *actually* forward to the complex
>>> builtins when not fast math. That seems a good idea
>> I have to add to this, however, that unless I did something badly wrong in
>> a quick prototype, simply forwarding to the (complex, complex) builtin
>> would *not* fix the round-off issue for this specific example. In other
>> terms it seems that to actually get 0 we really have to handle separately
>> (small) integer exponents, as Marc mentioned in the PR. Then again, is this
>> overall a libstdc++ issue or it would make sense to have the (..., int)
>> overloads restored at the *ISO* level?
There are 2 possible things we can want for pow(z, 4): be fast, or be the
correctly rounded value. I would (over-)interpret the presence of an int
overload in the standard as a hint that we want the first, and its absence
(or the C++11 wording) as a hint in favor of the second.
> ... or, alternately, just forward to the builtins (at least when not fast
> math) and have the builtins handle in an optimized way an exponent which is a
> small integer.
Implementing this optimization in the compiler when the exponent is a
compile-time constant seems like a good and simple idea in any case :-)
> I'm not at all convinced that when the Standard removes the
> (..., int) overloads we want to red-add the overloads back in the library as
> an implementation detail.
The standard didn't remove it, it added hundreds of others so the int
overload is now one among many covered by generic text.
--
Marc Glisse
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