[Haskell-cafe] Debugging Newton's method for square roots

Vraj Mohan r.vrajmohan at gmail.com
Sun Oct 15 08:17:20 EDT 2006


I am new to Haskell and need help in debugging my code.

I wrote the following function for calculating square roots using Newton's 
method:

my_sqrt :: Float -> Float
my_sqrt x = improve 1 x
         where improve y x = if abs (y * y - x) < epsilon 
                                then y 
                                else improve ((y + (x/y))/ 2) x
               epsilon = 0.00001



This works for several examples that I tried out but goes into an infinite loop
for my_sqrt 96. How do I go about debugging this code in GHC or Hugs?

(The equivalent code is well-behaved on MIT Scheme)



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