MATH(3M) 1991 MATH(3M)
NAME
math - introduction to mathematical library functions
DESCRIPTION
These functions constitute the C math library, libm. The
link editor searches this library under the -lm option.
Declarations for these functions may be obtained from the
include file <math.h>. The Fortran math library is
described in ``man 3f intro''.
LIST OF FUNCTIONS
Name Appears on Page Description Error Bound (ULPs)
acos sin.3m inverse trigonometric function 3
acosh asinh.3m inverse hyperbolic function 3
asin sin.3m inverse trigonometric function 3
asinh asinh.3m inverse hyperbolic function 3
atan sin.3m inverse trigonometric function 1
atanh asinh.3m inverse hyperbolic function 3
atan2 sin.3m inverse trigonometric function 2
cabs hypot.3m complex absolute value 1
cbrt sqrt.3m cube root 1
ceil floor.3m integer no less than 0
copysign ieee.3m copy sign bit 0
cos sin.3m trigonometric function 1
cosh sinh.3m hyperbolic function 3
drem ieee.3m remainder 0
erf erf.3m error function ???
erfc erf.3m complementary error function ???
exp exp.3m exponential 1
expm1 exp.3m exp(x)-1 1
fabs floor.3m absolute value 0
floor floor.3m integer no greater than 0
hypot hypot.3m Euclidean distance 1
infnan infnan.3m signals exceptions
j0 j0.3m bessel function ???
j1 j0.3m bessel function ???
jn j0.3m bessel function ???
lgamma lgamma.3m log gamma function; (formerly gamma.3m)
log exp.3m natural logarithm 1
logb ieee.3m exponent extraction 0
log10 exp.3m logarithm to base 10 3
log1p exp.3m log(1+x) 1
pow exp.3m exponential x**y 60-500
rint floor.3m round to nearest integer 0
scalb ieee.3m exponent adjustment 0
sin sin.3m trigonometric function 1
sinh sinh.3m hyperbolic function 3
sqrt sqrt.3m square root 1
tan sin.3m trigonometric function 3
tanh sinh.3m hyperbolic function 3
y0 j0.3m bessel function ???
y1 j0.3m bessel function ???
yn j0.3m bessel function ???
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NOTES
In 4.3 BSD, distributed from the University of California
in late 1985, most of the foregoing functions come in two
versions, one for the double-precision "D" format in the
DEC VAX-11 family of computers, another for
double-precision arithmetic conforming to the IEEE
Standard 754 for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. The
two versions behave very similarly, as should be expected
from programs more accurate and robust than was the norm
when UNIX was born. For instance, the programs are
accurate to within the numbers of ulps tabulated above; an
ulp is one Unit in the Last Place. And the programs have
been cured of anomalies that afflicted the older math
library libm in which incidents like the following had
been reported:
sqrt(-1.0) = 0.0 and log(-1.0) = -1.7e38.
cos(1.0e-11) > cos(0.0) > 1.0.
pow(x,1.0) != x when x = 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ..., 9.0.
pow(-1.0,1.0e10) trapped on Integer Overflow.
sqrt(1.0e30) and sqrt(1.0e-30) were very slow.
However the two versions do differ in ways that have to be
explained, to which end the following notes are provided.
DEC VAX-11 Dfloating-point:
This is the format for which the original math library
libm was developed, and to which this manual is still
principally dedicated. It is the double-precision format
for the PDP-11 and the earlier VAX-11 machines; VAX-11s
after 1983 were provided with an optional "G" format
closer to the IEEE double-precision format. The earlier
DEC MicroVAXs have no D format, only G double-precision.
(Why? Why not?)
Properties of D_floating-point:
Wordsize: 64 bits, 8 bytes. Radix: Binary.
Precision: 56 sig. bits, roughly like 17 sig.
decimals.
If x and x' are consecutive positive
D_floating-point numbers (they differ by 1
ulp), then
1.3e-17 < 0.5**56 < (x'-x)/x <= 0.5**55 <
2.8e-17.
Range: Overflow threshold = 2.0**127 = 1.7e38.
Underflow threshold = 0.5**128 = 2.9e-39.
NOTE: THIS RANGE IS COMPARATIVELY NARROW.
Overflow customarily stops computation.
Underflow is customarily flushed quietly to
zero.
CAUTION:
It is possible to have x != y and
yet x-y = 0 because of underflow.
Similarly x > y > 0 cannot prevent
either x*y = 0 or y/x = 0 from
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happening without warning.
Zero is represented ambiguously.
Although 2**55 different representations of
zero are accepted by the hardware, only the
obvious representation is ever produced.
There is no -0 on a VAX.
Infinity is not part of the VAX architecture.
Reserved operands:
of the 2**55 that the hardware recognizes,
only one of them is ever produced. Any
floating-point operation upon a reserved
operand, even a MOVF or MOVD, customarily
stops computation, so they are not much
used.
Exceptions:
Divisions by zero and operations that
overflow are invalid operations that
customarily stop computation or, in earlier
machines, produce reserved operands that
will stop computation.
Rounding:
Every rational operation (+, -, *, /) on a
VAX (but not necessarily on a PDP-11), if
not an over/underflow nor division by zero,
is rounded to within half an ulp, and when
the rounding error is exactly half an ulp
then rounding is away from 0.
Except for its narrow range, D_floating-point is one of
the better computer arithmetics designed in the 1960's.
Its properties are reflected fairly faithfully in the
elementary functions for a VAX distributed in 4.3 BSD.
They over/underflow only if their results have to lie out
of range or very nearly so, and then they behave much as
any rational arithmetic operation that over/underflowed
would behave. Similarly, expressions like log(0) and
atanh(1) behave like 1/0; and sqrt(-3) and acos(3) behave
like 0/0; they all produce reserved operands and/or stop
computation! The situation is described in more detail in
manual pages.
This response seems excessively punitive, so
it is destined to be replaced at some time in
the foreseeable future by a more flexible but
still uniform scheme being developed to handle
all floating-point arithmetic exceptions
neatly. See infnan(3M) for the present state
of affairs.
How do the functions in 4.3 BSD's new libm for UNIX
compare with their counterparts in DEC's VAX/VMS library?
Some of the VMS functions are a little faster, some are a
little more accurate, some are more puritanical about
exceptions (like pow(0.0,0.0) and atan2(0.0,0.0)), and
most occupy much more memory than their counterparts in
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libm. The VMS codes interpolate in large table to achieve
speed and accuracy; the libm codes use tricky formulas
compact enough that all of them may some day fit into a
ROM.
More important, DEC regards the VMS codes as proprietary
and guards them zealously against unauthorized use. But
the libm codes in 4.3 BSD are intended for the public
domain; they may be copied freely provided their
provenance is always acknowledged, and provided users
assist the authors in their researches by reporting
experience with the codes. Therefore no user of UNIX on a
machine whose arithmetic resembles VAX D_floating-point
need use anything worse than the new libm.
IEEE STANDARD 754 Floating-Point Arithmetic:
This standard is on its way to becoming more widely
adopted than any other design for computer arithmetic.
VLSI chips that conform to some version of that standard
have been produced by a host of manufacturers, among them
...
Intel i8087, i80287 National Semiconductor 32081
Motorola 68881 Weitek WTL-1032, ... , -1165
Zilog Z8070 Western Electric (AT&T) WE32106.
Other implementations range from software, done thoroughly
in the Apple Macintosh, through VLSI in the
Hewlett-Packard 9000 series, to the ELXSI 6400 running ECL
at 3 Megaflops. Several other companies have adopted the
formats of IEEE 754 without, alas, adhering to the
standard's way of handling rounding and exceptions like
over/underflow. The DEC VAX G_floating-point format is
very similar to the IEEE 754 Double format, so similar
that the C programs for the IEEE versions of most of the
elementary functions listed above could easily be
converted to run on a MicroVAX, though nobody has
volunteered to do that yet.
The codes in 4.3 BSD's libm for machines that conform to
IEEE 754 are intended primarily for the National Semi.
32081 and WTL 1164/65. To use these codes with the Intel
or Zilog chips, or with the Apple Macintosh or ELXSI 6400,
is to forego the use of better codes provided (perhaps
freely) by those companies and designed by some of the
authors of the codes above. Except for atan, cabs, cbrt,
erf, erfc, hypot, j0-jn, lgamma, pow and y0-yn, the
Motorola 68881 has all the functions in libm on chip, and
faster and more accurate; it, Apple, the i8087, Z8070 and
WE32106 all use 64 sig. bits. The main virtue of 4.3
BSD's libm codes is that they are intended for the public
domain; they may be copied freely provided their
provenance is always acknowledged, and provided users
assist the authors in their researches by reporting
experience with the codes. Therefore no user of UNIX on a
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machine that conforms to IEEE 754 need use anything worse
than the new libm.
Properties of IEEE 754 Double-Precision:
Wordsize: 64 bits, 8 bytes. Radix: Binary.
Precision: 53 sig. bits, roughly like 16 sig.
decimals.
If x and x' are consecutive positive
Double-Precision numbers (they differ by 1
ulp), then
1.1e-16 < 0.5**53 < (x'-x)/x <= 0.5**52 <
2.3e-16.
Range: Overflow threshold = 2.0**1024 = 1.8e308
Underflow threshold = 0.5**1022 = 2.2e-308
Overflow goes by default to a signed
Infinity.
Underflow is Gradual, rounding to the
nearest integer multiple of 0.5**1074 =
4.9e-324.
Zero is represented ambiguously as +0 or -0.
Its sign transforms correctly through
multiplication or division, and is preserved
by addition of zeros with like signs; but
x-x yields +0 for every finite x. The only
operations that reveal zero's sign are
division by zero and copysign(x,+-0). In
particular, comparison (x > y, x => y, etc.)
cannot be affected by the sign of zero; but
if finite x = y then Infinity = 1/(x-y) !=
-1/(y-x) = -Infinity.
Infinity is signed.
it persists when added to itself or to any
finite number. Its sign transforms
correctly through multiplication and
division, and (finite)/+-Infinity = +-0
(nonzero)/0 = +-Infinity. But
Infinity-Infinity, Infinity*0 and
Infinity/Infinity are, like 0/0 and
sqrt(-3), invalid operations that produce
NaN. ...
Reserved operands:
there are 2**53-2 of them, all called NaN
(Not a Number). Some, called Signaling
NaNs, trap any floating-point operation
performed upon them; they are used to mark
missing or uninitialized values, or
nonexistent elements of arrays. The rest
are Quiet NaNs; they are the default results
of Invalid Operations, and propagate through
subsequent arithmetic operations. If x != x
then x is NaN; every other predicate (x > y,
x = y, x < y, ...) is FALSE if NaN is
involved.
NOTE: Trichotomy is violated by NaN.
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Besides being FALSE, predicates that
entail ordered comparison, rather
than mere (in)equality, signal
Invalid Operation when NaN is
involved.
Rounding:
Every algebraic operation (+, -, *, /, sqrt)
is rounded by default to within half an ulp,
and when the rounding error is exactly half
an ulp then the rounded value's least
significant bit is zero. This kind of
rounding is usually the best kind, sometimes
provably so; for instance, for every x =
1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ..., 2.0**52, we find
(x/3.0)*3.0 == x and (x/10.0)*10.0 == x and
... despite that both the quotients and the
products have been rounded. Only rounding
like IEEE 754 can do that. But no single
kind of rounding can be proved best for
every circumstance, so IEEE 754 provides
rounding towards zero or towards +Infinity
or towards -Infinity at the programmer's
option. And the same kinds of rounding are
specified for Binary-Decimal Conversions, at
least for magnitudes between roughly 1.0e-10
and 1.0e37.
Exceptions:
IEEE 754 recognizes five kinds of
floating-point exceptions, listed below in
declining order of probable importance.
Exception Default Result
__________________________________________
Invalid Operation NaN, or FALSE
Overflow +-Infinity
Divide by Zero +-Infinity
Underflow Gradual Underflow
Inexact Rounded value
NOTE: An Exception is not an Error unless
handled badly. What makes a class of
exceptions exceptional is that no single
default response can be satisfactory in
every instance. On the other hand, if a
default response will serve most instances
satisfactorily, the unsatisfactory instances
cannot justify aborting computation every
time the exception occurs.
For each kind of floating-point exception, IEEE 754
provides a Flag that is raised each time its
exception is signaled, and stays raised until the
program resets it. Programs may also test, save
and restore a flag. Thus, IEEE 754 provides three
ways by which programs may cope with exceptions for
which the default result might be unsatisfactory:
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1) Test for a condition that might cause an
exception later, and branch to avoid the
exception.
2) Test a flag to see whether an exception has
occurred since the program last reset its flag.
3) Test a result to see whether it is a value that
only an exception could have produced.
CAUTION: The only reliable ways to discover
whether Underflow has occurred are to test
whether products or quotients lie closer to
zero than the underflow threshold, or to test
the Underflow flag. (Sums and differences
cannot underflow in IEEE 754; if x != y then
x-y is correct to full precision and certainly
nonzero regardless of how tiny it may be.)
Products and quotients that underflow gradually
can lose accuracy gradually without vanishing,
so comparing them with zero (as one might on a
VAX) will not reveal the loss. Fortunately, if
a gradually underflowed value is destined to be
added to something bigger than the underflow
threshold, as is almost always the case, digits
lost to gradual underflow will not be missed
because they would have been rounded off
anyway. So gradual underflows are usually
provably ignorable. The same cannot be said of
underflows flushed to 0.
At the option of an implementor conforming to IEEE
754, other ways to cope with exceptions may be
provided:
4) ABORT. This mechanism classifies an exception
in advance as an incident to be handled by
means traditionally associated with
error-handling statements like "ON ERROR GO TO
...". Different languages offer different
forms of this statement, but most share the
following characteristics:
- No means is provided to substitute a value for
the offending operation's result and resume
computation from what may be the middle of an
expression. An exceptional result is
abandoned.
- In a subprogram that lacks an error-handling
statement, an exception causes the subprogram
to abort within whatever program called it, and
so on back up the chain of calling subprograms
until an error-handling statement is
encountered or the whole task is aborted and
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memory is dumped.
5) STOP. This mechanism, requiring an interactive
debugging environment, is more for the
programmer than the program. It classifies an
exception in advance as a symptom of a
programmer's error; the exception suspends
execution as near as it can to the offending
operation so that the programmer can look
around to see how it happened. Quite often the
first several exceptions turn out to be quite
unexceptionable, so the programmer ought
ideally to be able to resume execution after
each one as if execution had not been stopped.
6) ... Other ways lie beyond the scope of this
document.
The crucial problem for exception handling is the problem
of Scope, and the problem's solution is understood, but
not enough manpower was available to implement it fully in
time to be distributed in 4.3 BSD's libm. Ideally, each
elementary function should act as if it were indivisible,
or atomic, in the sense that ...
i) No exception should be signaled that is not deserved
by the data supplied to that function.
ii) Any exception signaled should be identified with
that function rather than with one of its
subroutines.
iii) The internal behavior of an atomic function should
not be disrupted when a calling program changes from
one to another of the five or so ways of handling
exceptions listed above, although the definition of
the function may be correlated intentionally with
exception handling.
Ideally, every programmer should be able conveniently to
turn a debugged subprogram into one that appears atomic to
its users. But simulating all three characteristics of an
atomic function is still a tedious affair, entailing hosts
of tests and saves-restores; work is under way to
ameliorate the inconvenience.
Meanwhile, the functions in libm are only approximately
atomic. They signal no inappropriate exception except
possibly ...
Over/Underflow
when a result, if properly computed, might
have lain barely within range, and
Inexact in cabs, cbrt, hypot, log10 and pow
when it happens to be exact, thanks to
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fortuitous cancellation of errors.
Otherwise, ...
Invalid Operation is signaled only when
any result but NaN would probably be
misleading.
Overflow is signaled only when
the exact result would be finite but beyond
the overflow threshold.
Divide-by-Zero is signaled only when
a function takes exactly infinite values at
finite operands.
Underflow is signaled only when
the exact result would be nonzero but tinier
than the underflow threshold.
Inexact is signaled only when
greater range or precision would be needed
to represent the exact result.
BUGS
When signals are appropriate, they are emitted by certain
operations within the codes, so a subroutine-trace may be
needed to identify the function with its signal in case
method 5) above is in use. And the codes all take the
IEEE 754 defaults for granted; this means that a decision
to trap all divisions by zero could disrupt a code that
would otherwise get correct results despite division by
zero.
SEE ALSO
An explanation of IEEE 754 and its proposed extension p854
was published in the IEEE magazine MICRO in August 1984
under the title "A Proposed Radix- and
Word-length-independent Standard for Floating-point
Arithmetic" by W. J. Cody et al. The manuals for Pascal,
C and BASIC on the Apple Macintosh document the features
of IEEE 754 pretty well. Articles in the IEEE magazine
COMPUTER vol. 14 no. 3 (Mar. 1981), and in the ACM SIGNUM
Newsletter Special Issue of Oct. 1979, may be helpful
although they pertain to superseded drafts of the
standard.
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