Monday, February 27, 2012

Parametric Acumen

Last week we managed to make Acumen parametric in the type used for real numbers. We have tested this version of Acumen with both Scala's Double and the library for constructive reals in Java by Boehm. We believe the current implementation provides us with a tool to evaluate accuracy and efficiency of different implementations of real numbers when building models and simulations. Immediate improvements to the current version include 1) parsing constants as written by the Acumen programmer directly into the type of numbers in use, avoiding the current conversion to Double first; and 2) finding a suitable interface for comparing numbers, for example with an extra argument for the tolerance.