The October meeting minutes were accepted without objection.
Zuras briefly mentioned the status of the decimal subcommittee. A year ago, Cowlishaw approached the committee to talk about a decimal arithmetic standard. Those interested in the problem formed a subcommittee. We have settled some issues, and there remain a number of minor issues to be worked out, but there remains one major issue: normalization. We have agreed that we should come to the committee with a single proposal for debate. If we can come to an agreement soon, we would like to devote the January meeting (and perhaps more) to this issue. If we cannot come to an agreement, we will let the committee know one way or the other.
Changes:
Programmerwas consistently changed to
user.
all lowered.
We are still waiting for a universally acceptable definition of
exception.
Jim Thomas asked about the definition of
algebraic
operations (in the context of propagation of
NaNs); he thought there was a consensus from October that we
should not write a specific list of operations instead of using
a term like algebraic.
Bindel replied that if there was
such consensus, he was confused and failed to note it.
David Scott inquired about the behavior of rem(denormal, infinity) with underflow unmasked. We decided to come back to it whenever we finish with exceptions.
Hough noted that we still need definitions for exception,
signal,
and algebraic,
but thought that since we
could not summarize the situation in a few simple sentences,
making definitions should be deferred. David Scott agreed to
try to write definitions for exception
and signal.
Kahan agreed to try to write down the principles governing NaN
behavior, though, as Hough commented, the principles are
sufficiently involved that they may not belong in the standard.
Kahan noted that NaNs have a historical background going back to
Zuse, but the undefined
and indeterminate
notions
that preceded NaNs foundered due to their lack of defined
behavior. NaNs have defined behavior, and an attempt was made
to define that behavior well; but since it's provably impossible
to predict the behavior for a NaN argument for an arbitrary
function, we must adopt conventions, and that will lead to some
arguments. Fahmy suggested that, as a matter of presentation,
it might be easier to just specify how NaNs are treated when we
define the behaviors of specific functions.
We considered three types of min/max operations, each with
several variants. Besides the ordinary max (for which only the
behavior with signed zeros and NaNs was debated), we talked
about an absmax
function which would return the argument
of largest magnitude or the magnitude of the argument with
largest magnitude, an operation like the BLAS ixamax which would
return the index of the largest magnitude element of a vector,
and corresponding min functions. We spent most of our time
debating the exceptional behavior of ordinary min/max. We also
decided on a definition for absmin/absmax, but we decided not to
say anything about maximum index operations.
Kahan proposed two mathematical characterizations for max over the reals plus points at +/-inf which can be extended to NaNs:
We listed the following problem cases for defining min and max:
We agreed from the start that min and max should be symmetric in
their arguments, except possibly when both arguments are NaN (we
originally said commutative
rather than symmetric
until Kahan suggested the latter term). Zuras suggested we
apply a total ordering on all NaNs (e.g. order by the
significand value) in order to decide the behavior of max(NaN,
NaN), but there was no consensus. Schwarz commented that, from
a hardware perspective, he would prefer not to worry about
symmetry of max with respect to NaN arguments.
We argued far more about the behavior of max(x, NaN) where x is non-NaN. According to C99, max(x, NaN) is x; according to Java, max(x, NaN) is NaN. Schwarz and Riedy argued that max(x, NaN) should be NaN so that NaN results indicating a problem in a computation would not be lost. Thomas and Kahan argued that it is advantageous to get rid of NaNs whenever possible. Thomas pointed in particular to the behavior of hypot(inf, nan), and asked why similar principles did not apply to max. Reasonable behaviors seemed to include
The question, then, was which function should be the default. After some argument, Schwarz was persuaded that max(inf,NaN) at least should be defined as inf. When we returned after a break, others seemed to have accepted the notion that max should return a number when possible.
We also debated the signal behavior of NaNs. One suggested compromise was that max(x, NaN) would return x, but would signal invalid. Thomas pointed out that this would make max and min the only floating point operations that return a non-NaN floating point number but raise invalid. We eventually decided not to signal invalid on max(x, NaN), or at least we quit discussing the matter.
After we decided on the fate of ordinary min and max (except in the NaN, NaN case), we turned to absmin and absmax. Markstein and Okada pointed out that absmin and absmax are good for certain compensated summation algorithms. We settled on the following definition with surprisingly little debate: absmax returns the argument which is largest in absolute value. If both arguments have equal magnitude, then we let
Hough described his proposal for the addition of specified signed and unsigned integer formats of the same length as the floating point types. We have talked about how conversion to integer should work; it would also be convenient to have these types in order to get the bit pattern for a floating point number.
Hough proposed that the formats come in pairs: half size and full size. Only a few operations are specified: multiplications to get a full size number from two half sizes, and division of a full size by a half size to get a half size. Kahan asked about the application for these sizes; Hough responded that he used such things for binary to decimal conversion and for parts of certain high precision arithmetic ops inside transcendental functions and FMA. Hough noted that a better approach might be to specify same-size formats, and then specify the arithmetic operations for implementations that support both the 32-bit and 64-bit formats.
Riedy asked whether the arithmetic was actually used anywhere in the proposal. Hough replied that it was not, but that good integer support is part of the environment needed for certain types of floating point computation.
Hough then asked whether we wanted to pursue the proposal
further. We decided during Hough's description to remove the
half precision
part, and to put any integer arithmetic
operations in an appendix. That still leaves some other parts
that affect the standard. Zuras summarized the committee's
opinion as we're kind of agreed in principle except other
details.