Re: Do I have a second? Re: Motion to stop work on the standard
On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Ralph Baker Kearfott
<rbk5287@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> P-1788:
>
> Bill Walster has made a motion to suspend work on an interval
> standard (see his appended message). Do I have a second?
Yes.
> Note: As a practical consideration, I think this would effectively
> stop the current P-1788 effort, due to the time frame for
> delivery of our document and for the sponsor ballot. Starting
> up the project again would require another project authorization
> request, reforming a working group, etc. I estimate a lower bound
> on the delay to be 3 years, with an upper bound of
> infinity.
I agree, but premature optimization is one of the roots of all evil.
I'm not a math guy. I'm a computer guy. And I am fantastically
sensitive to the issue of invalid standards. A three-year wait sounds
about right for the community to gain some experience implementing and
experiencing the emergent behavior of the current draft.
Setting a standard has two connotations. One is a rigorous treatment
of the subject matter ab initio. The other is a correlation and
resolution of the inconsistencies between existing (probably
competing) implementations. P-1788 as it currently exists is a case
of the former. As such it needs to provide _rigor_ as its key
contribution. Bill is pointing out a serious shortfall in that
requirement.
Perhaps we could spend a couple years on the second approach to
standardization, especially once implementations of the P-1788
proposal become available and added to the existing population of
examples. After all, multiple implementations are the absolutely best
way to discover inconsistencies and ambiguities within the proposal.
As an implementer I don't care about the hard parts of the standard.
I care a lot about the bad parts of the standard.
I suspect the standardization sponsor would appreciate the seriousness
of these issues and the diligence with which we are approaching them.
After all, our deadline is a somewhat arbitrary date. The sensible
thing for us to do would be to estimate our real completion date and
make a formal request for an extension thereto.
> On 11/22/2013 11:24 AM, G. William (Bill) Walster wrote:
>>
>> How can a standard for computing with intervals be constructed if the
>> result of evaluating any given numerical expression that contains
>> intervals is ambiguous? I do not believe it can, and therefore, I
>> believe such a construction is premature. As evidence of this fact, I
>> the recent discussion concerning the content of Motion 52 is more than
>> sufficient proof.
>>
>> Therefore, I move that all work on a standard for computing with
>> intervals be suspended until such an unambiguous interval mathematical
>> foundation is developed and published in "The Mathematics of Computation."
Personally I think waiting for publication might be excessive delay.
I would be satisfied with a written consensus foundation that made two
classes of issues clear: (i) all assumptions on which the foundation
rests, and (ii) all (interpretive) design decisions for which
reasonable (and perhaps some "unreasonable") alternatives exists.
I further offer a friendly amendment to Bill motion. I want more than
the "level 1" math. We need the rigor applied to the transforms from
"level 1" to "level 2". So a purely mathematical treatment is
necessary but not sufficient. I defer to Bill on the specific wording
of this suggestion.
FWIW,
Lee Winter
Nashua, New Hampshire
United States of America