From metcalf@mail.cern.ch Tue May 6 16:09:59 1997 Received: from mail1.cern.ch (mail1.cern.ch [137.138.128.19]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id QAA17176 for ; Tue, 6 May 1997 16:09:58 +0200 Received: from sp052 (sp052.cern.ch [137.138.129.237]) by mail1.cern.ch with SMTP id QAA10626 (8.8.5/IDA-1.6 for ); Tue, 6 May 1997 16:09:27 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 16:09:27 +0200 (METDST) From: Michael Metcalf X-Sender: metcalf@sp052 Reply-To: Michael Metcalf To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Subject: Floating-point arithmetic Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII There is a fascinating article, "On the need for predictable floating-point arithmetic in the programmming languages Fortran 90 and C/C++" in the March issue of SIGPLAN. It criticises both the language standards and their (named) implementations (although C++ comes off better than f90!). It applauds John Reid's efforts to improve the situation. Full details are at ftp://hwins.uia.ac.be/pub/CANT/SIGPLAN. My conclusion would be that, since this appears to be an area where C++ beats f90 on its home ground, getting this right in F2000 deserves a higher priority than burdening the language with interval arithmetic. Regards, Mike