Draft text v7.3 with revised Level 2

[John Pryce <prycejd1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

P1788

Particular greetings to those of us who are in Edmonton, and I look forward to tonight's Skype audio conference and hope it will take place without any glitches.

As my contribution to that meeting I circulate a new draft of the text. The main change is that Level 2 and Input/Output are, I believe, now complete (if not actually finalised).

- The Level 2 decoration stuff has been integrated with the rest of Level 2 instead of being in a separate "Decoration system at Level 2" clause. This removes a lot of cross-referencing, and makes Level 2 less fragmented and I believe more readable.

- The intro to Level 2 has been revised somewhat. It now emphasises that a Level 2 operation returns a result for arbitrary inputs (unlike Level 1), which is an important theoretical fact from the viewpoint of Level 3.

- The intro to Level 3 is also revised. It has a definition of "representation" that I hope people will roughly agree with and which IMO makes certain things usefully precise for implementers.

- I've sort of assumed the current motions will pass. If they don't, there'll be some more changes to make.

- Interval literals remain. I made the change from Empty, Entire to [Empty], [Entire]. I didn't change anything else I think, waiting for response to my recent queries (only Juergen replied so far). 

  But I now feel we should ditch mid-rad form, since uncertain form (coming from the Vienna Proposal) does essentially the same job, and is able to do what the Sun compilers' uncertain form does.

  Note Input/Output relies heavily on interval literals.

- As a small item, I decided cancelMinus, cancelPlus have no use for decorated versions. I revised their Level 2 with a few examples to illustrate numerical difficulties.

With such a big revision, inconsistencies will inevitably arise. I hope people will read with a critical eye and point them out.

Baker, when do we vote on the current motions?

Best wishes

John Pryce

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