This is so strange: a few days ago I commented on an HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40582712) about when "programmer" became an acknowledged job title, and, in my comment, mentioned how I used a Chebyshev approximation followed by two iterations of Newton's method to compute sqrt, and then today this article shows up with exactly that use case!
I wrote that code (to compute sqrt 2) in 1974 or 1975 in IBM 360 Assembler. I used a conditional macro constant that increased the number of iterations of Newton's from 2 to 3 just in case the client wanted double precision.
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This is so strange: a few days ago I commented on an HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40582712) about when "programmer" became an acknowledged job title, and, in my comment, mentioned how I used a Chebyshev approximation followed by two iterations of Newton's method to compute sqrt, and then today this article shows up with exactly that use case!
I wrote that code (to compute sqrt 2) in 1974 or 1975 in IBM 360 Assembler. I used a conditional macro constant that increased the number of iterations of Newton's from 2 to 3 just in case the client wanted double precision.