[racket] 80-bit precision in Racket

Joe,

> The Supercomputer Toolkit (
> http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/94/HPL-94-30.html ) was
> designed for doing numerical integration of celestial bodies over large
> periods of time.
>
> "The Toolkit's compiler uses a novel strategy based upon partial evaluation
> [7, 9]. This exploits the data-independence of typical numerical
> algorithms to generate exceptionally efficient object code from source
> programs that are expressed in terms of highly abstract components written
> in
> the Scheme dialect of Lisp [14]."

Thank you, this is a very interesting article, and I never saw this
paper about "partial evaluation" technique that it references to.

> "In hindsight, the use of quad precision appears to have been overly
> conservative for this problem"

Might be, and may still be, but the precision of astronomical
observation has grown much since the time the paper was
written, and so have the requirements to the ephemeris.

Best regards,

Dmitry