Re: [Stds-754] motion: update exception and flag operations for

[David Hough 754R work <754r@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> a much more fundamental issue,
> namely the shift from a primitive-oriented view of the 1985 standard
> to a language-oriented view of 754R which most of the participants
> seem to favour.

This is very intentional; despite billing itself as a standard for 
a programming environment, 754's biggest failures were not addressing language
issues at all, and defining hardware primitives rather than 
application-programmer-usable features, so most of its 
innovative ideas have gone unused.     

This is an uphill
battle; some of us labored for a year to address these issues, and one by
one our solutions have been rejected or removed from the normative text.
Of course the group with the largest immediate stake in the standard is
hardware implementers, and so the working group consists almost entirely
of them, and tends to gravitate toward that point of view.     
One of Bob Davis's jobs is to insure a wider representation
in the balloting body.