On Fri, 14 May 2010 21:07:32 -0500, tom wrote:

Don't think that seemingly large chunks mean poor accuracy. When the
algorithm is good, and the program selects the chunk size well, the
results can be very close to the true answer.

I recall Simpson's Rule from work about 23 years ago that lead me to
finding more accurate methods in a great compendium of
"Numerical Recipes
The Art of Scientific Computing."
Press, Flannery, Teukolsky, Vetterling,
Cambridge University Press, 1986

which has Simpon's 3/8th Rule, and a more extensive
"Bode's rule... This is exact for polynomials up to and
including degree 5.
"At this point the formulas stop being named
after famous personages, so we will not go
any further. Consult Abramowitz and Stegun
for aditional formulas in the sequence."
The book continues with FORTRAN (my first language) and Pascal (my 9th
or 11th language or dialect by that time) interpretations of a
spectrum of math systems for another 700 pages....

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC