Variable-precision exponentiation

  • Authors:
  • P. L. Richman

  • Affiliations:
  • Bell Telephone Lab, Inc., Denver, CO

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1973

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Abstract

A previous paper presented an efficient algorithm, called the Recomputation Algorithm, for evaluating a rational expression to within any desired tolerance on a computer which performs variable-precision arithmetic operations. The Recomputation Algorithm can be applied to expressions involving any variable-precision operations having O(10-p + ∑ | &egr;i |) error bounds, where p denotes the operation's precision and &egr;i denotes the error in the operation's ith argument.This paper presents an efficient variable-precision exponential operation with an error bound of the above order. Other operations, such as log, sin, and cos, which have simple series expansions, can be handled similarly.