[Cfp-interest] terms DPD and BID

[Mike Cowlishaw]

Sounds good to me, too.
 
Thanks -- Mike


  _____  

From: Cornea, Marius [mailto:marius.cornea at intel.com] 
Sent: 02 March 2013 00:45
To: Jim Thomas; Mike Cowlishaw
Cc: CFP; Cornea, Marius
Subject: RE: [Cfp-interest] terms DPD and BID



Jim,

If we make this change we should probably remove 'bid' and 'dpd' from the
function names as well.

I am ok with the new names you proposed.

Thank you,

Marius

 

From: Jim Thomas [mailto:jaswthomas at sbcglobal.net] 
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 2:15 PM
To: Mike Cowlishaw; Cornea, Marius; CFP
Subject: Re: [Cfp-interest] terms DPD and BID

 

Ok, back to this issue. In email on 2/19/2013 I made an attempt at using the IEC
60559 terminology:

 

. we might say in (Part 2) 12.3 something like:

 

"The types

.

represent values of decimal floating types in one of the two alternative
encodings allowed for decimal formats by the IEC 60559 standard: the encoding
based on decimal encoding of the significand or the encoding based on binary
encoding of the significand, "

 

and in 12.4.2:

 

"The encodedpd functions convert the argument into the encoding based on decimal
encoding of the significand. ."

 

and similarly for the other re-encoding functions

 

and add something about our use of the acronyms dpd and bid in type and function
names, or else change the names.

 

 

Mike and Marius, is this what you have in mind? We might change the function
names to encodedecd32, encodebind32, etc. 

 

-Jim 

 

 

On Feb 20, 2013, at 1:45 AM, Mike Cowlishaw <mfc at speleotrove.com> wrote:





Jim & Marius,

While I agree with Mike that it should be better to use the IEC 60559
terminology, the reality is that DPD and BID were easier to identify the two
encodings and are spread widely in various publications.

So unless Mike feels very strongly about avoiding DPD and BID I would leave them
in, properly qualified as you suggested.

 

I don't have an opinion on the use of BID (although it has some slang meanings
in the UK, so I would avoid it).   I do feel very strongly about the use of DPD
to refer to the encoding as a whole, however.  It was a useful
abbreviation/jargon for committee use, but it does not do justice to the very
neat encoding of the exponent, etc., devised by Dan Zuras and others.   It's not
even the case that the whole coefficient is encoded using DPD.

 

I don't quite see the difficulty in using the  IEC 60559  terminology (perhaps
abbreviated).  Anyone implementing or using this level of detail will surely
have to be aware of that terminology anyway, and introducing a second way of
saying the same thing is best avoided if possible.

 

Mike

 

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