> You can perfectly well compute it, and the general consensus among the
> floating-point community is that trig functions should do the best they
> reasonably can even on huge arguments. Techniques for doing this kind
> of reduction reasonably efficiently have been known for at least 20
> years, e.g.

Yes you can perfectly compute sin 10e100.

But if x is the result of any computation (with rounding error), and x 
is huge, sin x may be any value between -1 and 1. So the best value from 
sin x is either 0 (your possible error is minimum) or nan.


-- 
Christophe Raffalli
Université de Savoie
Batiment Le Chablais, bureau 21
73376 Le Bourget-du-Lac Cedex

tél: (33) 4 79 75 81 03
fax: (33) 4 79 75 87 42
mail: Christophe.Raffalli@univ-savoie.fr
www: http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~RAFFALLI
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