From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Feb  1 21:19:06 2001
Subject: Re: ISO C++ and Octave
From: Mumit Khan <khan at NanoTech dot Wisc dot EDU>
To: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
cc: khan at xraylith dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 21:19:04 -0600 (CST)

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, John W. Eaton wrote:

> Nope.  That looks pretty bad.  Sort of like
> 
>   octave:6> sin (pi)
>   ans =  1.2246e-16
> 
> (would it really hurt to make this a special case?).

I must confess that I don't have a opinion either way that I
can back up. On one hand, we certainly can't expect exact
precision from finite precision numerics, but on the other
hand, users of software such as Octave may have come to expect
certain "nice-ness". Don't know ...

Regards,
Mumit