dgh%dgh@Sun.COM (David Hough) (08/19/88)
The third public review of X3J11's Draft ANSI Standard C is nearing its close on 1 September 1988. This third review is based upon a draft dated 13 May 1988 which is not greatly changed from earlier drafts except that the controversial "noalias" keyword was removed. Consequently the Draft still leaves a good deal to be desired from the numerical point of view. I have two documents available for electronic distribution. I will be glad to send you tbl/troff -ms source for these; I'll send both unless you specify that you only want the newer one described below. Unfortunately the Draft ANSI Standard itself is not publicly available in electronic form. The first available document is my 29 March 1988 commentary prepared for the second public review period (30 pages), with X3J11's formal responses of 22 April interspersed. The following were co-conspirators: Greg Astfalk Larry Breed D. Burton W. J. Cody Iain Johnstone W. Kahan Zhishun Alex Liu David Mendel Jim Meyering K-C Ng Gene Spafford Philippe Toint Stein Wallace The second available document is a draft, subject to revision until submitted about 25 August, of my commentary for the third public review. It's only about 10 pages since I generally avoided directly repeating what was in the earlier document. I'm looking for additional reviewers and conspirators on this one. The abstract follows: The proposed C standard suffers numerical shortcomings - many inherited from its precursors - in areas of interest to providers of portable mathematical software. I comment in detail upon the following aspects of the proposed standard: Comment #1, Section 3.9: encourage sound practices Comment #2, Section 3.9: disparage hazardous practices Comment #3, Section 1.1: emphasize surprises in rationale Comment #4, Section 1.1: anticipate supplemental standards Comment #5, Section 2.2.4.2: use "significand" Comment #6, Section 2.2.4.2: <float.h> has too many names, not enough information Comment #7, Section 3.2.1.4: round conversions between floating types Comment #8, Section 3.5.4.2: fix arrays Comment #9, Section 4.5: exceptions in mathematical functions Comment #10, Section 4.5: tell more in the rationale Comment #11, Section 4.5: standardize hypot Comment #12, Section 4.5.4.6: delete modf Comment #13, Section 4.7: specify which signals can arise David Hough dhough@sun.com na.hough@na-net.stanford.edu {ucbvax,decvax,decwrl,seismo}!sun!dhough
jlg@beta.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) (08/20/88)
Why was this announcement posted to comp.lang.fortran?