Chapter 8. Complicated Functions via Tables
AS WE MENTIONED in Section 5.3, before pocket calculators became cheap and powerful, we used printed lookup tables. They were in the appendices of finance, trig, or statistics textbooks, or added to the back of exam papers. Today, the teacher assumes that the students have a pocket calculator and puts some restrictions on just how “smart” the calculators are allowed to be (e.g., can you hide “cheat sheets” in the memory?).
The reasons for a return to auxiliary lookup tables depend on the improvements in hardware and parallel software. A table with a few thousand values of the function will fit into main storage, where the values can be joined in parallel in queries and shared among multiple users to ...
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