On entry: ifail must be set to , or to set behaviour on detection of an error; these values have no effect when no error is detected.
A value of causes the printing of an error message and program execution will be halted; otherwise program execution continues. A value of means that an error message is printed while a value of means that it is not.
If halting is not appropriate, the value or is recommended. If message printing is undesirable, then the value is recommended. Otherwise, the value is recommended. When the value or is used it is essential to test the value of ifail on exit.
On exit: unless the routine detects an error or a warning has been flagged (see Section 6).
6Error Indicators and Warnings
If on entry or , explanatory error messages are output on the current error message unit (as defined by x04aaf).
Errors or warnings detected by the routine:
On entry, . Constraint: . is too large and the function returns the approximate value of at the nearest valid argument.
An unexpected error has been triggered by this routine. Please
contact NAG.
See Section 7 in the Introduction to the NAG Library FL Interface for further information.
Your licence key may have expired or may not have been installed correctly.
See Section 8 in the Introduction to the NAG Library FL Interface for further information.
Dynamic memory allocation failed.
See Section 9 in the Introduction to the NAG Library FL Interface for further information.
7Accuracy
Let and be the relative errors in the argument and result respectively.
If is somewhat larger than the machine precision (i.e., if is due to data errors etc.), then and are approximately related by:
Figure 1 shows the behaviour of the error amplification factor
Figure 1
However, if is of the same order as machine precision, then rounding errors could make slightly larger than the above relation predicts.
For small the amplification factor is approximately , which implies strong attenuation of the error, but in general can never be less than the machine precision.
For large , and we have strong amplification of errors. However, the routine must fail for quite moderate values of , because would overflow; hence in practice the loss of accuracy for large is not excessive. Note that for large the errors will be dominated by those of the standard function exp.
8Parallelism and Performance
s18aef is not threaded in any implementation.
9Further Comments
None.
10Example
This example reads values of the argument from a file, evaluates the function at each value of and prints the results.