Expressing mathematical subroutines constructively

Authors:
Gerald Roylance
Affiliations:
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Venue:
LFP '88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
Year:
1988

Citing 1
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Abstract

The typical subroutines that compute sin(x) and exp(x) bear little resemblance to our mathematical knowledge of these functions: they are composed of concrete arithmetic expressions that include many mysterious numerical constants. Instead of programming these subroutines conventionally, we can express their construction using symbolic ideas such as periodicity, Taylor series, and economization. Such an approach has many advantages: the code is closer to the mathematical basis of the function, is less vulnerable to errors, and is trivially adaptable to various precisions.