On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 08:53:22PM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, David Roundy wrote:
It seems that you're arguing that (**) is placed in the correct class, since it's with the transcendental functions, and is implemented in terms of those transcendental functions. Where is the abomination here?
(**) should not exist, because there is no sensible definition for many operands for real numbers, and it becomes even worse for complex numbers. The more general the exponent, the more restricted is the basis and vice versa in order to get sound definitions.
Would you also prefer to eliminate sqrt and log? We've been using these functions for years (in other languages) without difficulty, and I don't see why this has changed. I think it's quite sensible, for instance, that passing a negative number as the first argument of (**) with the second argument non-integer leads to a NaN. -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University