Fun One Liners

There was a discussion about the complex step method a while ago here:

It is a neat trick, but it only works for complex analytic functions, which essentially rules out all nontrivial programs. Moreover, it can just fail silently (without erroring), which is a debugging nightmare.

So I don’t think it is something one would use in practice in any language. Incidentally, if a language for scientific computing doesn’t allow a disciplined AD implementation in 2019, prospects for that language are quite grim.

9 Likes