Re: back to the roots - a simpler standard?
P1788
On 29 Jun 2013, at 16:13, Neher, Markus (IANM) wrote:
> Obviously, a practical interval standard could be much simpler that the one under development.
Markus, I agree with the last sentence.
- If we had not had competing theoretical underpinnings (set-based versus modal or Kaucher intervals) we could have made it simpler by doing without flavors.
- If we had not had strong voices requesting support for mid-rad and other kinds of representation, we could have avoided "explicit" and "implicit" interval types, restricted ourselves to inf-sup, and made it even simpler.
- We might have restricted ourselves to systems whose underlying floating point is 754-conforming, which would have made it simpler again.
The democratic process has led to all these complications.
I suspect 99% of implementations will have only set-based theory, inf-sup representation, and underlying 754 arithmetic. We could write the standard at maybe half the length if restricted to that. Was the extra effort worth it? I think we don't (yet) know.
It would be nice if someone writes a 1788 tutorial on that restricted basis...
John Pryce