Re: You think you had it rough

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#4970

From: ja... Jack Campin
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 1990 15:31

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p...@aristotle.jpl.nasa.gov wrote:
> [the Sinclair Scientific] did not threaten our established method in high
> school of computing exotic functions like sines - 4-figure tables -
> because it only displayed 5 sig. fig., and 2 of those were iffy after a
> few calculations...

On one of the Sinclair calculators (the Oxford or Cambridge), they were
more than just iffy.  The sine function always returned a value that was
33% too low.

Sinclair wasn't the first to do that.  I had the very same problem with IBM
1130 Fortran around 1969.

Anyone used a compiler that had the wrong value for pi?  must have happened
to somebody...

-- 
--  Jack Campin   Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank
Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland   041 339 8855 x6044 work  041 556 1878 home
JANET: ja...@cs.glasgow.ac.uk    BANG!net: via mcsun and ukc   FAX: 041 330 4913
INTERNET: via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk   BITNET: via UKACRL   UUCP: jack@glasgow.uucp

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<1990Oct2.123010.6371@mozart.amd.com> <8725@helios.TAMU.EDU> <15909@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1990Oct3.171253.18381@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>

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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!ukc!strath-cs!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack
From: ja...@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: You think you had it rough
Message-ID: <6481@vanuata.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 4 Oct 90 15:31:29 GMT
References: <1990Oct2.123010.6371@mozart.amd.com> <8725@helios.TAMU.EDU> <15909@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1990Oct3.171253.18381@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: ja...@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie, Unthank
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Posted: Thu Oct  4 16:31:29 1990
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