Hi David,

On Sunday December 10 1995, David Noon wrote from 2:440/4 to Mike Bilow:

 DN> ========================== CUBRT.PAS =========================

 DN> { A function to calculate cube roots
 DN>   using the Newton-Raphson method.}

 DN> FUNCTION CUBRT(N : REAL) : REAL;

 DN> CONST
 DN>      eps = 1E-12; { Adjust for hardware precision }
 DN> VAR
 DN>      x, xnew : REAL;
 DN> BEGIN
 DN>      IF N = 0 THEN
 DN>           xnew := 0
 DN>      ELSE IF N > 0 THEN
 DN>           xnew := 1
 DN>      ELSE
 DN>           xnew := -1;

 DN>      IF xnew  0 THEN
 DN>      REPEAT
 DN>           x := xnew;
 DN>           xnew := (x + x + N/SQR(x))*(1E0/3E0)
 DN>      UNTIL ABS(x-xnew) >= ABS(x)*eps;

............................~~

 DN>      CUBRT := xnew
 DN> END;

 DN> ==============================================================

(-:  If you change the >= which I have underlined to <= then it works
very well using my compiler, which is Prospero Pascal.  :-)

BTW:  I agree with much of what you wrote about Pascal in general -- but
      it works very well as an applications language for me and the
      compiler I use is very flexible when it comes to adding library
      functions coded in assembler or in Pascal itself.  :-)

Best regards,
Mike.

--- GoldED 2.50+