Some thoughts on motion 24.03
I wanted to add a few reasons for voting Yes on motion 24.03 but forgot, so here they are. I agree with Dan Zuras's objections in many ways but think they are missing the point. I had a compromise suggestion, but Michel & Vincent didn't think much of it, so I go with the motion as stated.
I see this as about, not "what hardware should do", but "what implementations provide". If 1788 is implemented as a library, then operations "add with rounding upwards", etc., are to be available as named operations in the library. These features aid writing library code that is concise and portable. I see them as part of the infrastructure, "level 3.5" say, for coding this same library, i.e. for coding level 3. No matter if a crude version of them is 100 times as slow as optimised code on some platforms. If they bring forward by 6 months the release of the first complete, fully tested, highly portable, P1788 library (I think they might) they will have justified their existence. Then one can tune for speed, by many methods of known effectiveness.
John Pryce