17 Mar
1998
17 Mar
'98
10:42 a.m.
At 09:21 PM 3/16/98 +0000, you wrote:
In article <Pine.LNX.3.95.980316132720.19589A-
100000(a)behemoth.host4u.net>gt;, Doug Yowza <yowza(a)yowza.com> writes
The obvious answer, from the non-PhD perspective, an analog computer tied
together with a digital computer. Let the analog computer decide which
problems to hand over to the digital computer, just like humans do when
they're working at the office.
To be fair, analog computers can do things digital
computers can't. For
example, a digital computer can only approximate 1.0/3.0 whereas an
analog box has no trouble with this. Certain ops would also be much
faster with analog vs. digital, but I'd have to guess that these are
implementation issues that get lost in the noise.
But a digital computer can
represent rational numbers exactly as you
have (e.g. Smalltalk has a rational data type which behaves just like
any other number) but irrational numbers cause problems. But then can
an analogue machine represent irrational numbers exactly? --
Lawrence Wilkinson ljw(a)formula1.demon.co.uk
--
David Wollmann
dwollmann(a)ibmhelp.com