Re: small integers

[jim@fpr.com (James E. O'Dell)]

...

>/// I don't believe Seymour Cray built his machines the way he did because
>/// he liked getting incorrect answers.
>
>I don't either.  On the other hand, debugging wrong algorithms may not have
>been as important in design as getting answers from already working ones.  When
>machine-time is more expensive than programmer-time this is an option one has.

The already working codes had to be developed at least once though. And most
large numeric programs are constatntly being twiddled. Take some of the large
"Hydrodynamics" codes run at the national laboratories. They are constantly
being upgraded to agree with the latestest experimental data. The codes are
then tested regressively against all previous data for agreement. This is a very
time consuming process.

A modern, efficent development environment would help considerably.

Also, think of all the image processing and full motion video code that will be
developed in the coming years. Most of that code is intensely numerical.
It will be important for that code to execute quickly. We we be forced to write
that code in C or Fortran? I hope not.

Jim