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Examples

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