>> I learned to do square roots on paper, probably something over 70 years >> ago, but today I'd have to use a calculator AND the answer would have to >> make sense > > You'd be surprised to know the percentage of people that would > accept *any* result from a calculator, even if it doesn't make > sense at all. > > When I was in high school most math or physics teachers would > accept an error in the calculations for an exam problem if the > logic of the solution was right. But I had one who didn't. His > reasoning was that if you make a stupid calculation error as an > engineer, the result would be as useless as if you didn't grasp > the problem at all. The bridge would collapse or the airplane > would fall out of the sky. And he was right. Remember the 10^8 > dollar NASA Mars probe that got lost because JPL was using > imperial units while NASA expected metric ones ? maybe the engineers payed too much attention on getting all the computations right :) errors happen, most of us are humans. the question is mainly how to catch and avoid them: programming languages can easily do dimensional analysis at compile-time if the dimensions are encoded into the type system. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
