Re: Languages, languages ... (was: 754R and Reproducibility)

[Guillaume Melquiond <guillaume.melquiond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le mercredi 11 juillet 2007 à 11:10 -0400, Michel Hack a écrit :
> > I may be misunderstanding.  But it seems like you would like to require
> > a set of floating-point operations to be available directly at assembly-
> > language level.  I think this is a really drastic move.
>
> Not at all!  What I want is the ability for a platform that *does*
> provide the necessary primitives to be able to claim conformance.

[...]

> Btw, technically, my proposal would even allow a Turing Machine vendor
> to claim compliance, by publishing the subprograms needed to "complete
> the implementation".  That would be silly of course, and there would be
> no good reason for anybody to do that.

Now I am even more confused. For example, take the soft-float library.
This library does provide a 754-compliant environment; it is published
in the public domain; and it can be compiled on almost any existing
processor. Thanks to this library and your proposal, it means that any
vendor can claim to produce a processor compliant with the standard.
That is really great, but I'm not sure it is actually an improvement.

Best regards,

Guillaume