🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9106072346.AA08023@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> jbs@WATSON.IBM.COM writes:


>   I don't believe interval arithmetic is used enough to justify
>   any hardware support.

This falls into the "H.R." chicken and egg rathole. If interval
arithmetic (or anything else new and claimed to be good) is 100x
slower than the traditional approach, it will simply never get off the
ground. The members of IEEE 754 chose to include rounding modes; at
this point we should either craft arguments for deleting them from a
future version of the standard or debate something else. Arguing for
their inclusion in a system is now a moot point; they are part of the
standard. 

>.... credentials...

Kahan was given the ACM Turing award for his contributions to floating point
(most notably the IEEE standard). I personally suspect this counts for
more than some heated debates on usenet. It is pointless for us to
post our respective resumes. 

>... misc. fortran vs. ieee interactions ....

The ways various standards interact is usually unpleasant in edge
cases (SVID vs. POSIX vs. ANSI C for example). One hopes that in time,
sucessful standards will see evolution _towards_ mutual compatibility.
In the meantime it is a series of "quality of implementation issues"
for each vendor to cope with as best they can.

X3J3 and X3J11 both steered away from trying to make their languages
fully IEEE 754 savvy. Unfortunately, there does not yet seem to be a
move afoot to correct this in their next efforts .... but "f90" is
just out the door (standard-wise) so we have ample time to hope for
the best from X3J3|WG5 next time ;> It is unclear to _me_ if X3J11 or
X3J16 is really the best forum for trying to fix C the next time ....
there is a group called NCEG which is taken on the challenge of
crafting proposals and finding an eventual venue.

As has been pointed out by others, there are very few computing
environments which provide handles on the bulk of the IEEE754 knobs.
This is unfortunate, as many of the benefits of IEEE754 are lost
thereby. Thus providing those who wish to propose weaker fp standards
with fodder of the sort "no one uses those features anyway" ... this
is quite unfortunate.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Keith H. Bierman    keith.bierman@Sun.COM| khb@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM
SMI 2550 Garcia 12-33			 | (415 336 2648)   
    Mountain View, CA 94043