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As the basic operations on floating-point numbers don't match the
basic operations on real numbers, computational adequacy doesn't hold
for floating-point computation--this is another way of putting the
well-known fact that computer programs developed using algebra and
analysis in a rigorous fashion sometimes produce wrong answers in
practice. But computational adequacy has been proved for some data
types and programming languages for exact real number
computation [25,47]. This is
discussed in Chapter 11 below.
Martin Escardo
2000-10-02