The Nation: All Clear?

To someone, somewhere—but whom?—the memorandum circulated recently at Harvard Business School's division of computer service doubtless made perfect sense. It read, in full: "We have been informed by DEC that a bug in the normalization algorithm used in three MACRO instructions (FADL, FSBL and FMPL) can cause a FORTRAN double precision compare to give incorrect results. A double precision compare should be accurate to 16 digits. This bug can cause the compare to give incorrect results in the ninth digit. We will notify all Users as soon as we receive a solution to...

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