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Re: Empty interval representations (general)



On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 3:44 AM, Vincent Lefevre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2010-05-05 10:12:56 -0500, R. Baker Kearfott wrote:
>> That's an interesting stance since, I think (correct me if
>> I am wrong), that, except for "big-endian" and "small-endian",
>> 754 does specify formats.  Of course, an argument for
>> not specifying is:  "it does not matter what's inside
>> if what is actually seen is as specified."
>
> Actually, there's more than "big-endian" and "small-endian".
> ARM FPA has a mixed-endian format for binary64 (little-endian
> 32-bit words stored as big endian). And any implementation is
> free to store the bit string in any order it wishes.

Indeed, and are HP machines that phyiscally "reverse" bit patterns
and yet comply to IEEE-754.

> For interval arithmetic, there can be more possibilities since
> there are 2 numbers to store, unless we want to specify this.

what would be the point of doing that?  Are we excluding interval
arithmetic packages from computer algebra systems?