Bruno Lalande wrote:
Hi,
You will find attached to this mail the header file of the pow function, a cpp test file and the documentation in .qbk format. I tried to write docs and tests in accordance to those found in the math library. The files are ready for integration since I placed them respectively into boost/math, libs/math/test and libs/math/doc in my own environment. Let me know if anything has to be changed or added.
I passed the tests on : - gcc-2.95 (debian) - gcc-3.3 (debian) - gcc-3.4 (debian) - gcc-4.1 (kubuntu) - icc-10.1 (debian) - msvc-8.0 (XP SP2) - msvc-9.0 (XP SP2)
It didn't compile with msvc-6.5. It's not surprising since, if I remember well, this compiler doesn't handle partial template specialization even with SP5. Is this compiler still officially supported by Boost?
There is one case for which I don't know what to do : the pow<negative value>(0) case, which obviously crashes since it consists of computing 1/0. Should I check it and throw something, or let the platform's division by 0 behavior (if any) do its effect? I personally think the first approach is better since it ensures an uniform behavior accross platforms.
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... ? You will need to overload pow like this: template <int N, class T, class Policy> typename tools::promote_args<T>::type pow(T, const Policy&) { // Actual implementation goes here: uses the specified policy to handle errors. } template <int N, class T> inline typename tools::promote_args<T>::type pow(T x) { return pow<N>(x, policies::policy<>()); }
The return type is a double. Now I'm going to study the possibility of having different possible return types.
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. Keep up the good work! John.