[racket] 80-bit precision in Racket

On 11/15/2012 01:35 PM, Joe Marshall wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Dmitry Pavlov <dpavlov at ipa.nw.ru
> <mailto:dpavlov at ipa.nw.ru>> wrote:
>
>
>      > "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.
>
>
> It seems to me that before you just "throw bits at it" that you might
> want to estimate the error.

One easy way to do that is throw more bits at it, round to fewer bits, 
and see what the absolute or relative difference is. I do that using 
bigfloats all the time.

I know you probably meant error analysis, and that's also a good idea. :)

Neil ⊥