Re: An additional thought Re: Some thoughts on Motion 19 (still under vote)
Ralph Baker Kearfott wrote:
I think motion 19 was meant to be a compromise to maintain some level of
simplicity while providing minimal specifications to other arithmetics
that may be common. The committee needs to decide whether or not
we need to do that and whether or not motion 19 accomplishes that.
More importantly, the committee needs to decide whether or not
a standard that does not support the most widely used applications
of interval techniques is a standard worth having.
The main thing that Motion 19 accomplishes is to compromise the standard
to an extend that it becomes useless for general global optimization and
for rigorous solution of nonlinear systems in unbounded domains,
by allowing a midrad-only implementation to conform to the standard.
It is impossible to build upon such a standard a branch-and-bound code
that supports unbounded intervals (needed already in many linear
programs).
The least amendment that must be made to Motion 19 to permit it being
called a compromise (rather than a slap in the face of an important
part of the user community) is to _require_ that at least one explicit
idatatype is supported.
This would not harm any of the other functionality (such as midrad or
multiple precision support) the committee might want to burden itself
with, through accepting the otherwise unchanged motion.
Arnold Neumaier