17 Mar
1998
17 Mar
'98
7:54 a.m.
On 16 Mar 98 at 21:21, Lawrence Wilkinson wrote:
In article <Pine.LNX.3.95.980316132720.19589A-
100000(a)behemoth.host4u.net>gt;, Doug Yowza <yowza(a)yowza.com> writes
When I took my Electronics course , one of my greatest bafflements
and frustrations was dealing with the "approximations" of analogue
circuits. Needless to say it was a great relief when we moved on to
the exactitude of digital circuits.
ciao larry
lwalkerN0spaM(a)interlog.com
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