P1788 Clauses 1 and 2
This is an excellent piece of work, and a pleasure to read. There is
a lot of new material, and generally well presented.
I jumped however upon reading the very first sentence:
This standard specifies ... following ... at least one floating-point
type defined by the IEEE-754/2008 standard.
When did we decide this? We were going to have additional requirements
for joint compliance with 1788 and 754 *if* a 754-type was supported,
but I thought it was going to be possible to be 1788-compliant without
using 754-types.
I realise that the "Scope" is (I think) not really normative, but this
should (if *unintended*) probably be rephrased, e.g.
...and at least one fully-specified numeric type
such as an IEEE-754/2008 floating-point type.
1.6: Wouldn't "Clause 7" be a little late to use "forward references"
for details? Or am I misunderstanding the overall layout?
1.8 item (1): The concept of "level 2 data" will presumably not have
been introduced yet, so it should use at least a forward reference.
1.8 item (8): This needs to be qualified. It might be necessary to
invoke a "reproducible transformation unit" though a wrapping
interface ("glue module") to incorporate it in a non-reproducible
environment, as the level 3 representations might differ.
The requirement is useful and makes sense in the conceptual sense.
2.1, near bottom of page 4, 2nd bullet for the set-based flavor introduction:
... -- precisely, all closed and connected ...
The "all" only applies to Level 1; at Level 2 it is a finite subset
of the set of all closed and connected subsets.
2.1, last sentence on page 4: The style is probably a bit too personal.
A topic that we avoided ... outside our remit from IEEE.
2.3, end of 2nd paragraph:
...though few programming languages have yet adopted that.
This *might* still be true 15 years from now, but lets be optimistic
and replace "yet" with "as of this writing".
2.4, [a,b] notation. Does this representation by endpoints need an
introduction? It was mentioned informally in the context of the
cset interpretation (3rd paragraph of 2.1), and is indeed fairly
common mathematical notation. Perhaps I'm too much of a stickler.
Michel.
---Sent: 2012-12-01 23:24:40 UTC