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Arnold Neumaier wrote:
Nate Hayes wrote:- Who will benefit? Who wants to exchange interval data between systems, based on mid-rad formats?Has anyone in this forum ever worked with a mechanical engineer or architect, or seen the computer software tools they use? In those applications and domains, tolerancing of parts is almost always done in mid-rad, e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7f5cjspuAs&feature=related we should be so lucky that some of the largest and most successful software companies in the world, such as Autodesk, Dassault Systems, Parametric Technology, etc. would some day use our P1788 standard. Having at least an interchange format for mid-rad with standardized conversion rules I suspect would be a minimal requirement.Section 5.2 of the Vienna proposal discusses conversion of intervals to midrad format, and Section 6.8 to midrad text output. The opposite conversion direction is discussed only in Section 6.3 (midrad text to interval). But I see now that the proposal forgot to add in Section 2.5 a constructor that takes two floats x,r, and creates the tightest interval containing x+-r. This is enough to interface to the engineering world.
I think you're probably right, Arnold. My understanding of Hossam's suggestion is basically what you mention, but with conversion to and from some additional binary mid-rad format (not just text mid-rad, e.g.). Maybe the new constructor you mention would be all that's required to accomplish this?
On a related note, I think all that you mention above might also be enough of an interface for any vendor or implementor who wished to use mid-rad as an internal format, if only there is a relaxation on the rule that endpoints of an interval must obey inclusion isotonicity and not neccissarily be exact (as is the current proposed wording).
So possibly with not much more than you outline it is possible for P1788 to provide compatibility wiht mid-rad as an internal format (for those vendors that may be interested in taking this path) without requiring much work or schedule risk to the P1788 process.
It seems most people agree on the basic mid-rad interchange format principle. There may not be all that much left that is required for us to have our cake and eat it, too.
Any thoughts? Nate