At 09:21 PM 3/16/98 +0000, you wrote:
>In article <Pine.LNX.3.95.980316132720.19589A-
>100000_at_behemoth.host4u.net>, Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com> writes
>>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?
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.
>--
>Lawrence Wilkinson ljw_at_formula1.demon.co.uk
--
David Wollmann
dwollmann_at_ibmhelp.com
Received on Tue Mar 17 1998 - 10:42:36 GMT