2nd CD of Language-Independent Arithmetic (ISO CD 10967-1)

[Ed Barkmeyer]

Attached is a mailgram from the DEC editors, telling you how to FTP a
copy of the PostScript file.  Be advised:  the draft is 30 pages of 
specifications and 50 pages of rationale and bindings to programming languages, 
about 600KB of PostScript.

This document will officially go to public
commentary in the U.S. about mid-November, but if you send your questions
and comments to the editors, they will be considered by the U.S. and
international committees.

Although Jim Demmel believes this is a bad standard, I am hoping even
he will appreciate the value of this document with the changes made.
The committee met with IFIP 2.5, who had a similar reaction to the previous
draft.  The IFIP group agreed with the motivation for the document, but
disagreed that the document stayed within the scope suggested by the
motivation.  It was supposed to propose a model of Real Arithmetic which
was applicable to most implementations, to require implementors to document
their Real arithmetic implementation in terms of the model, and to require
the implementation values of the model parameters to be available at run
time.  The previous version got carried away with the model parameters and
ended up looking like a bad IEEE-754.  With the assistance of Jim Cody of
IFIP 2.5, that problem is believed to have been corrected in the new draft.

Making the model parameters available at run time means that one can call
ULP() and get the value of the least significant mantissa bit, instead of
doing doubtful things like A+B-A-B.  That is why LIA is a Good standard,
as a companion to IEEE 754.  

-Ed Barkmeyer

--------------------Begin Included Message-------------------------------

Date: Tue, 8 Sep 92 13:50:53 -0400
From: craigacrl.dec.com
To: edbarkacme.nist.gov, edwardskastlvm7.iinus1.ibm.com
Subject: LIA-1 via anonymous ftp
Reply-To: schaffertacrl.dec.com


Dear Friends,

The second committee draft of

	Information technology --
	Language independent arithmetic --
	Part 1: Integer and floating point arithmetic

(formerly called the Language Compatible Arithmetic Standard, LCAS) is now
available for anonymous ftp from

	Node:		crl.dec.com
	Directory:	pub/misc
	File:		lia-1-v40-cb.ps		(569K bytes)

This postscript file contains version 4.0 of the LIA-1, and has substantive
differences from the previous version (3.1) marked with change bars.  A
compressed version of this file (Unix compress file format) is available as

	File:		lia-1-v40-cb.ps.Z	(216K bytes)

The first committee draft is still available as

	File:		lia-1-v31.ps		(545K bytes)

There are two follow-on LIA standards also under development

	Part 2: Mathematical procedures
	Part 3: Complex arithmetic and procedures

No drafts for these standards are available yet.

							-- Craig Schaffert

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