[COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was [TUHS] V9 shell

[Wesley Parish]

I think it's implicit with fooling around with slide rules. Everything
is logarithmic, therefore imprecise beyond a certain level (floating
point number or iteration, it's the same problem). You learn to
approximate, within a certain level of confidence (or diffidence :).

(FWVLIW - I bought a Dover book on slide rule in the late 70s while at
high school, and shortly after, a real slide rule, and it's stuck with
me.)

Wesley Parish

On 2/13/20, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 10:01 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> What little Fortran background I have suggests that the difference
>> might be mind set.  Fortran programmers are formally trained (at least I
>> was, there was a whole semester devoted to this) in accumulated errors.
>> You did a deep dive into how to code stuff so that the error was reduced
>> each time instead of increased.  It has a lot to do with how floating
>> point works, it's not exact like integers are.
>
> Just a thought, but it might also be the training.   My Dad (a
> mathematician and 'computer') passed a few years ago, I'd love to have
> asked him.   But I suspect when he and his peeps were doing this with a
> slide rule or at best an Friden mechanical adding machine, they were
> acutely aware of how errors accumulated or not.  When they started to
> convert their processes/techniques to Fortran in the early 1960s, I agree
> with you that I think they were conscious of what they were doing.   I'm
> not sure modern CS types are taught the same things as what might be taught
> in a course being run by a pure scientist who cares in the same way folks
> like our mothers and fathers did in the 1950s and 60s.
>