Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!bill From: bill@ut-emx.UUCP (Bill Jefferys) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Bug in EXCEL v. 2.2, and a flame Message-ID: <16863@ut-emx.UUCP> Date: 10 Aug 89 05:54:37 GMT References:<1989Aug1.193850.4999@mdivax1.uucp> Reply-To: bill@emx.UUCP (Bill Jefferys) Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas Lines: 38 In article <1989Aug1.193850.4999@mdivax1.uucp> hiebert@mdivax1.uucp (Graeme Hiebert) writes: #In article jk3t+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jonathan King) writes: #> #> Interesting. My calculator (a Sharp EL-512 II) gives virtually the same #> erroneous square root as Excel! That is, the square root of .999975 is #> given as .999987499. It looks like this problem is not unique to Excel; #> to make its way into the entirely silicon brain of my calculator this error #> must be the result of an ancient and honorable (although badly conditioned) #> numerics routine... #> #> jking # #Very interesting indeed. My Sun gives # sqrt(0.9999750000000000000000000) = 0.9999874999218740234222409 #and # 0.9999749992187 * 0.9999749992187 = 0.9999499990624 ^[insert 8 here] ^[insert 8 here] #Now, let's see, if I do the multiplication by hand, I get [long, irrelevant calculation omitted] # 0.99994999906243906561042969 # ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ # Well look at that. My Sun multiplies the same way I do. Shame on us. Shame on me. I mistyped the number Excel gave, leaving out the "8". There IS bug in Excel, however. I apologize to everyone on the net for my typo, which has caused great confusion. I have received mail from Microsoft, acknowledging the bug, and saying that they have located and fixed it. I hope the the corrected version will be made available for those with older machines soon. Also, I want to thank all those who helped to attract Microsoft's attention to my plea. Bill Jefferys