Problem with using std.math: abs and std.complex: abs at the same time

[berni]

On Thursday, 19 September 2019 at 11:16:12 UTC, Simen Kjærås 
wrote:
> Might I ask what specifically you're working on?

Of course. It's about issue 15881 (and 15763), namely approxEqual 
not always doing, what people think it should do. (As a side 
note: I stumbled over this, when I wanted to file a bug report, 
because I thought it's not doing, what it should do. In my case I 
was comparing the distance of geographic items in a town. 
approxEqual decided, that two items which where at opposite ends 
of the town, are at the same place. Seen from a global 
perspective, this might indeed be true, but here it was not, what 
I was looking for.)

Well, some people (including me) think, that approxEqual should 
be a replacement for == for floatingpoint numbers, to accept 
small errors, that inevitantly creep in. But approxEqual accepts 
rather large errors with it's default values. (Probably because 
it's first use was to write some unittests for other functions in 
phobos, where this is sufficent to make the unittests pass, but 
not optimal, as errors might stay undetected). As it's not easy 
to define "small", I searched in the internet, if others have 
investigated on this and came up with [1], which, in my eyes, is 
a very good summary.

Now I'm working on a replacement for approxEqual with the 
constraints given in [1]. My first try (PR #7173) was a little 
bit too fast and would have caused quite some trouble, so I 
closed it and replaced it with two new PRs (#7180 and #7187) as 
suggested by n8sh.

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0485/