Because of a late posting, the minutes of the November meeting were neither approved nor disapproved. Delp was appointed to record the minutes of this session.
The schedule of meetings for early 2003 was announced and agreed to:
| Date | Location | Host |
|---|---|---|
| January 23 | Sun, Menlo Park | Hough |
| February 20 | Intel, Santa Clara | Scott |
| March 20 | H-P, Palo Alto | Markstein |
| April 17 | H-P, Cupertino | Thomas |
Concerning the report of the Decimal Arithmetic Subgroup, Zuras reported that an impasse on the issue of Normalized vs. Unnormalized had been partially resolved by compromise: the encoding format advocated by the Unnormalized faction was provisionally adopted; the arithmetic advocated by the Normalized faction was deferred. Details of the encoding format are available at http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decarith.html. Professor Kahan forecast that in the relatively distant future, the continuing decline in the cost of processors and of memory would result (in applications intended for human interaction) in the displacement of substantially all binary floating-point arithmetic by decimal. Zuras remarked that our subcommittee would likely have to address issues concerning any revision to or compatibility with IEEE 1596.5 (data interchange).
Collishaw then made a presentation of details of the recommendations of the Decimal Arithmetic Subgroup. See http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decarith.html.
Hough reviewed the Draft Document, including revisions agreed to last meeting.
A discussion of the max/min functions ensued. Moved by Hough; seconded by Zuras: That the names "max" and "min" should be adopted for these functions by 754 in the reports of this subcommittee, in spite of the fact that not all languages spell the names of the functions in the same way. Adopted by voice vote.
There was general agreement that both of the following properties are desirable:
Also, the issue of the desired result when both arguments are zeroes was discussed. For the case where the zeroes are of opposite sign, both "return +0" and "return the right operand (violating symmetry)" were discussed. For the case where both zeroes are negative, both return -0 (one of the operands) and return +0 (by analogy with the +0 returned by the subtraction of equal negative numbers). Thomas and Darcy were asked to investigate the matter further and report at the January meeting.
A discussion of testing floating-point implementations -- especially hardware -- followed. Both black-box tests and architect-specific tests were alluded to. The problems in testing hardware items wherever unspecified or implementation-dependent results are present were briefly mentioned as being of serious concern to several members.