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For better or worse (likely the latter)...
- To: Rees at YALE
- Subject: For better or worse (likely the latter)...
- From: Kent M. Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 82 00:47:00 GMT
- Cc: BUG-LISP at MIT-MC, Nicolau at YALE, Ruttenberg at YALE
- Original-date: 24 March 1982 19:47-EST
Feature. There is no hardware for doing better than that on KA's, so even
tho' KL's and 20's and such could use double precision, it isn't done. At
least that's my understanding of why the case of PLUS errs. PLUS is defined
to error check (sadly, if you number declare its args, it no longer will,
but you can explain to the folks there about that, I assume). Anyway, the
answer to your question is that +$ is defined to -- for better or worse --
yield whatever the hardware yields for that operation, and the hardware always
gives back some answer, it never errs. So you always get whatever trash it
gives back when you do bounds over/under-running. Use PLUS with no declarations
if you care about error checking.
--kmp
ps. the same lossage applies to +, //, //$, and their spelled out counterparts.
pps. oops. not lossage. sorry. the same "feature" applies...