7 The Transcendentals Module
7.1 Introduction
The Transcendentals module, exported from the Common Extensions library, provides a set of open generic functions for ANSI C-like behavior over real numbers. The restrictions and error cases described in this chapter are intended to be the same as they are in ANSI C.
The single module, transcendentals, exports these generic functions and methods.
Because implementation of these functions might be by a standard library for transcendentals accessed by a foreign function interface, the exact precision and algorithms (and hence, the exact results) for all of these functions is explicitly unspecified. Note, however, that a program expects the following, even in libraries that are implemented by calling foreign libraries:
- Domain and range errors should be signalled as Dylan errors.
- Floating point precision contagion must obey Dylan rules (that is, functions called on single precision values return single precision results, and functions on double precision values return double precision results)