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to- (validgh!numeric-interestaEng.Sun.COM)
from- David M. Gay (dmgaresearch.att.com)
re- IEEE arithmetic

Lately there has been much noise -- and little signal -- about IEEE
arithmetic in this newsgroup.  Although many systems can claim to
offer hardware IEEE arithmetic, all too often programmers of these
systems do not see proper support for that arithmetic, and thus are
not really computing in an IEEE-arithmetic environment.

Readers who have been following this newsgroup for a while will recall
the Numeric C Extensions Group (NCEG), which labored mightily to
propose extensions to C and its standard libraries that would give
programmers a genuine IEEE-arithmetic programming environment.  NCEG
became a subcommittee of X3J11 (the C standards committee) and
produced a report, whose current draft appears to be

	ftp://ftp.dmk.com/DMK/sc22wg14/c9x/floating-point/TR/fpce.ps.gz

The Forward to this draft well describes the sorry situation that
prompted many of the recent postings.  In part, the Forward says

	...  The IEEE standards do not include language bindings -- a
	cost of delivering the basic standard in a timely fashion.  ...
	Expediencies of programming language implementation and
	optimization can deny the features offered by modern hardware.
	In the meantime, particular companies have defined their own
	IEEE language extensions and libraries...; not surprisingly,
	lack of portability has impeded programming for these
	interfaces.