Re: [Gcl-devel] [Maxima] Stable Maxima version on Gentoo

[Raymond Toy]

>>>>> "Camm" == Camm Maguire <address@hidden> writes:

    >> It seems so random.  What happens if strtod prints out xxx...99999
    >> when the "true" answer is xxxy...0000?  And the corner cases might not
    >> be what you think are corner cases.  For example, see
    >> http://trac.common-lisp.net/cmucl/ticket/1.
    >> 

    Camm> Well, strtod takes a string and gives a double, without malloc it
    Camm> appears (as makes sense).  This would seem to be an unambiguous 
mapping
    Camm> with a definitive algorithm, but of course bugs are always possible.

Not sure what difference it makes if strtod doesn't malloc.

    Camm> The key loop in the just committed implementation is:

Sorry, the code is just too hard to read and understand without
comments or even reasonable variable names?  b? p?

    >> At least with the lisp code you have a provably correct algorithm
    >> guaranteed to produce the correct answer.  (Barring bugs in
    >> implementation, of course!)
    >> 

    Camm> I'd like to look at this as an improvement at some point.  But I do

Sure.

    Camm> think controlling allocations will be critical, which at least was not

Why is controlling allocations critical?  Because GC is slow?

Anyway, my only real comment was that it seemed so ad hoc.  

Ray