[Coco] printing out floating point numbers...(only peripherally related to coco)

[Robert Gault]

jdaggett at gate.net wrote:
> Robert
> 
> Someth9ing jgged the memory when y ou mentioned Fractals. I 
> stayed away from that like the plague as I found it interesting but  
> had  no real use for them. 
> 
> I just wondered if a psuedo Cordic Rotator might do some of the 
> math a bit easier? The precsion is limited by the number of 
> iterations and the precison of  tables for the various functions. 
> 
> Neat things one can do with Cordic Math. 
> 
> james
> 
 ><snip>

Could be but that goes beyond my area of competence :)  I think that for 
specific usage as in Mandelbrot set calculations, where more precision 
is required than ieee doubles can provide, fixed point calculations need 
to be used. This was covered in detail by Steve Ciarcia in Byte, Nov 
1988, p399-406, where he used 8 byte twos complement numbers to increase 
precision. There is a book "Fractal Creations - 2nd Ed.", by Time Wegner 
and Bert Tyler, Wait Group Press, ISBN 1-878739-34-4, which contains 
programs on CD. The math routines are very fast and the CD contains C 
source code.