dgh@sun.uucp (David Hough) (09/03/85)
Calculator for IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic
Now that there is an approved IEEE standard for binary
floating point arithmetic, persons interested in implement-
ing the standard may be interested to learn of a software
implementation of the standard available in the public
domain. This implementation, called the IEEE calculator,
provides a way to test your implementation in progress
against a fairly complete implementation of the standard as
it was specified in 1980. The IEEE calculator allows one to
enter numbers in decimal or hex notation, perform any of the
operations specified by the standard, and view the numerical
results in decimal and hex as well as the exceptions sig-
nalled.
The IEEE calculator is written entirely in Pascal and
computes results a bit at a time. Consequently the arith-
metic is too slow to use for any significant number of cal-
culations but is ideal for debugging new implementations by
providing a comparison for results and exceptions.
As public domain software the IEEE calculator is com-
pletely unsupported; users bear the entire responsibility
for determining its correctness for and applicability to any
specific purpose. The program implements the standard as
specified in 1980, but most subsequent changes in the stan-
dard are minor.
Source code for the IEEE calculator will be published
on USENET, the Unix network, in the newsgroup mod.sources,
shortly after this announcement appears.