[Numeric-interest] IEEE 754R revision effort

[David Hough 754R work]

The IEEE 754R revision effort has entered its eighth year.
All the active participants are pretty tired and would like to wrap things
up as quickly as possible.

However I see no value in publishing in haste and repenting at leisure while
trying to explain specifications that are ambiguous
or obscure.    I am particularly concerned about issues around expression evaluation
and the mapping of programming language expressions into operations of the draft
standard.    754's unspecification in this area has led to 20 years of misunderstandings,
particularly around higher intermediate precision.

But there can be opposition to rewriting ambiguous text, even rewriting which
is not supposed to change the specification,  since a clarification might meet
one person's presuppositions and not another's, and hence might precipitate further
review cycles.

It would help me determine whether I am on the right track or jousting at windmills if
some individuals from the technical computing application writing, 
mathematical software libraries, language design, and language implementation
communities would take a fresh look at the troublesome areas
and say what they think.     I have already read the comments from 
persons on the IEEE 754R sponsor ballot group, on which chip and system implementors
are well represented.

I have written a long evaluation of the current draft 1.6.0 covering high-level
issues:

 http://754r.ucbtest.org/msc-ballots/ballot5.html

which also has some low-level nitpicking, and also a list of lost causes - things that
seem suboptimal but unfixable.  

I am currently most concerned with draft 1.6.0 clause 10 and clause 5.4.1.
Some of my commentaries are in the form of proposed strikeouts in green and
proposed additions in red:

 http://754r.ucbtest.org/msc-ballots/clause10.pdf
 http://754r.ucbtest.org/msc-ballots/formatof.pdf

but they may be hard to interpret without the context of a whole draft.
Draft 1.6.0 isn't publicly accessible, so if you need it,
you must request a review copy from Bob Davis (bob at scsi.com). 
An older draft 1.5.0 is available at 

 http://754r.ucbtest.org/drafts/archive/2007-10-05.pdf

which has a number of differences from 1.6.0, but not many in these particular clauses.