Hi John,
Can you follow the error handling policies for overflow here:
http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk/libs/math/doc/sf_and_dist/html/math_too...
OK, this is done. Using boost::math::tools::promote_args<T>::type to calculate the result type
based on the argument type will work for integer and floating point args: not sure how this integrates with Boost.Units though.
Maybe we don't have the same need here. What I don't understand is the fact that for you, a power with integral argument should return a double. My original need when I first talked about returning different possible types was just to respect the type used by the caller. That is, if the caller asks for pow<2>(int) and works with integers in all the rest of its code, providing the result in a float or double can be disturbing and even slow it down. For instance, returning the result of pow<2>(10) in a float sounds unnatural to me if 10 was originally stored in an int. But obviously, pow<-N>(int) should return a floating point since the result is of the form 1/int. If I understand well, your approach is rather to take care of providing a type capable of holding the result even in case of big integral exponent and big integral base. Am I right or is there another rationale behind what you propose? Which one of those two approaches is the most appropriated in your opinion? Thanks Bruno