>>>>> "Xavier" == Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr> writes:

    Xavier> The Intel x86 has an interesting quirk: it computes
    Xavier> internally in extended precision (80 bits), and rounds to
    Xavier> double precision (64 bits) only when storing a result in
    Xavier> memory.  This means that in a piece of code such as

    Xavier>         let x = a * b + c

    Xavier> the virtual machine will compute a * b, round it (by
    Xavier> storing it in memory), add c, and round the result.  While
    Xavier> the native-code compiler will compute a * b, keep the
    Xavier> result in extended precision in the top float register,
    Xavier> then add c, then round the result.

    Xavier> In extreme cases (badly conditioned algorithm, computation
    Xavier> of errors), you may thus get different results.

sorry about the late reply. but i was hung up with other stuff.
thanx for the explanation. i've found out that indeed my computation
was ill-conditioned and have fixed it now. 
in fact, were it not for this intel quirkiness, i might have
overlooked the bug for some-time. this definitely tops my 
list of ways i've debugged code! 

before i was able to spot the problem with my code, i tried
downloading the src on a different architecture. however, it
seems that the tar file is broken, since it creates files when it should
be creating dirs. i never faced this problem for my linux box since 
i downloaded the binary rpms. anyway it does'nt matter for now since
i know what the problem is. but in future it might be useful to
compile ocaml on a different architecture (i had tried both 2.01 &
2.02). 

- shyjan
carnegie mellon university