david@glance.ch (David Mosberger) (08/22/90)
Recently, two articles appeared in a SIGPLAN paper concerning the optimal conversion of floating point numbers represented in a decimal scientific notation to binary floating point representation and back. ``Optimal'' is meant in the sense of ``best approximation to the true binary/decimal value''. The presented algorithms were very elaborate. However, they require either multi-precision integers or extended precision floating-point operations or both. I would like to know, what the best is one can get using single precision floating point only? I.e., if you want to convert to/from single precision floating point numbers, the algorithm should only use single precision floating point operations (of course, integers with a ``usual'' size may be used as well). Is there an optimality criterion for such an algorithm? David Mosberger Glance Ltd. Software Engineer Gewerbestrasse 4 david@glance.ch 8162 Steinmaur UUCP: {...}!{uunet,mcsun}!elava!david Switzerland X.400: S=david;O=glance;P=switch;A=arCom;C=ch BITNET: david@glance.ch or david at glance.ch -- Send compilers articles to compilers@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us {ima | spdcc | world}!esegue. Meta-mail to compilers-request@esegue.