quad precision question

[Brigitte.Verdonk]

> 
> I've not seen "IEEE quad" explicitly defined.  Have I missed it?  
> Would it fall under the IEEE radix-independent standard?
> 
> Baker
> 

Quadruple precision has not been formalized by the IEEE standard;
it is just a special instance of Double extended precision.

Clearly, the name comes from the fact that 4 times as much memory
is used as for one IEEE single (128 bits). Whether this memory is
used as a paired-double (as mentioned in the mail of Nelson Beebe),
or as a sequence of 128 bits with 1 bit for the sign, 15 for
the exponent and 112 bits for the significand (with one implicit leading
bit, yielding a precision of 113 bits), depends on the hardware
manufacturer. 

> A colleague and I recently submitted a long journal article analyzing
> quadruple-precision arithmetic implementations with respect to
> computation of certain functions, and found far too many
> implementation deficiencies and errors in the more than 40 Fortran 77,
> 90, 95, and HPF compilers, and 55 C and C++ compilers, covering all
> major desktop platforms in use today.  Java, regrettably, does not
> even admit to the need for quadruple-precision arithmetic.
>
>
> Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254     

Is it possible to get a pointer to these results?

Best regards, 


----------------------------Brigitte Verdonk----------------------------------
---------------------Postdoctoral Fellow FWO-Vlaanderen-----------------------
Dept. of Math. and Comp. Sc.             Tel.  +32 3 820.24.03
University of Antwerp (UIA)              Fax.  +32 3 820.24.21
Universiteitsplein 1                     URL: http://www.uia.ac.be/u/verdonk
B2610 Wilrijk-Antwerp (Belgium)          Email: verdonkauia.ua.ac.be
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