What I get from this thread is that
- We have had at least four valid formulas presented for the topological
"A interiorTo B" when A and B are nonempty, all of which, in principle,
seem to allay Nate's worst fears of performance hit. My nextDown/nextUp
method is clearly bad if these are done in software, but they are such
trivial operations given the 754 number encoding, and so useful, that I
would hope a bit of chip area would be devoted to hard-wiring them in the
near future.
- I am very sceptical that anyone could predict which of the 4 will work
best on a given commonly used architecture, and that probably depends
strongly on how vectorised the code is.
- An "overall best way" to represent Empty in an inf-sup interval type
depends on many things and I am equally sceptical that we can predict it.
So, reluctantly, I believe P1788 should NOT standardise a representation
of Empty this time around. It can do so at the next revision of 1788, if
existing implementations show a "best way" has emerged.