Re: Containment is necessary but not sufficient...
On Aug 26 2011, Dan Zuras Intervals wrote:
Containment is necessary but not sufficient.
Not by a long shot.
I have omitted most of your remarks, which are correct but incomplete.
In addition to the requirements you state about a standard, there are
some even more important ones:
1) It must be sufficiently flexible to be useful for a significant
proportion of real, practical, scientific codes.
2) It must be sufficiently usable to deliver reasonable results
for the above set of codes.
3) It must be both specifiable and implementable, both in theory
and practice, for the above set of codes.
4) It must be compatible with the languages that people are going to
use it from, as those languages exist and are used.
If it fails on ANY of those, it will fail, just as 754 has failed to get
into programming languages; when the 754R project started, many people
had hopes that those problems would be addressed, but they weren't.
There are very good reasons that all languages in the past 50 years,
with the possible exception of Ada and the failed example of Java, have
produced what are the equivalent of 'containment-only' specifications
for their floating-point operations. Nobody knows how to do better, AND
meet all of the above requirements. That is not for lack of trying.
If you think that you can, fine. But let's see your horse before
agreeing to ride away on it. I think that you are specifying Pegasus.
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.