Re: comparisons between floats and ratios

[David A. Moon <Moon@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 21:00:53 PST
    From: fateman@dali.berkeley.edu (Richard Fateman)

    I remain unconvinced, and a private note from Cassels also didn't
    help. (My mailing system was unable to send to Cassels individually,
	      so here is a simplified response )
    consider (/ (expt 10 68) 1.0E38) .
    The numerator overflows when you convert to floating point.
    The quotient is representable. I think that CL should err on the
    side of slow&correct.

How is this example different from (/ (* 1.0e34 1.0e34) 1.0E38) ?

If you want to campaign against the widespread misimpression that floating
point is foolproof way to do numerical calculations, that's a fine thing, but
I think this is the wrong mailing list.