C++: A Dialog Programming with the C++ Standard Library

Rapid and Accurate Calculation

The most impressive attribute of modern computers, of course, is their speed; as we have already seen, this is measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second).

Of course, raw speed is not very valuable if we can't rely on the results we get. ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers, had a failure every few hours, on the average; since the problems it was solving took about that long to run, the likelihood that the results were correct wasn't very high. Particularly critical calculations were often run several times, and if the users got the same answer twice, they figured it was probably correct. By contrast, modern computers are almost incomprehensibly reliable. With almost any other machine, a failure ...