Re: Containment is necessary but not sufficient...
On Aug 26 2011, J. Wolff von Gudenberg wrote:
I think that we do not have the time to work on more than 1 concrete
types and suggest that we proceed with the discussion of IEEE 754
(binary) interval in inf-sup representation, and drop all the others for
specialists.
Hmm. There are many people who believe that an interval specification
should be generic, and concrete bindings should be an addition. That
is the way to make it resistant to future developments, and will increase
the chances of it being adopted by language standards.
Nick's concern on implementing intervals on top of existng codes enters
some language specific accuracy problems which have to be considered
separately
There seems to be some misunderstanding. I am NOT talking about existing
codes, but existing languages and existing application designs. Most
existing codes will need extensive rewriting, whatever you specify. That's
not a hard task, just time-consuming, and the issues are more basic.
If the standard doesn't fit into the languages, it won't be adopted.
We saw that with 754, as many of us predicted would happen in 1984.
If a standard does not address a programming community's requirements,
which includes covering the special functions that they need, it won't
get used. We saw that with Pascal, Ada and many others.
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.