J. Palmer’s research while affiliated with Intel and other places

The Microprocessor Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society sponsors two groups drafting proposed standard for floating-point arithmetic. The first, Task P754, reported Draft 10.0 of a Proposed Standard for Binary Floating-point Arithmetic out of committee in December. 1982. That document is now a de facto standard and is progressing slowly through the approval process within the IEEE Computer Society.

The Microprocessor Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society sponsors two groups drafting proposed standards for floating-point arithmetic. The first, Task P754, reported Draft 10.0 of a Proposed Standard for Binary Floating-point Arithmetic out of committee in December, 1982. The document is now a de facto standard and is progressing slowly through the approval process within the IEEE Computer Society. In August 1983, the second group, Task P854, completed Draft 1.0 of a Proposed Radix- and Word-length independent Standard for Floating-point Arithmetic that generalizes and is upward compatible with the IEEE Proposed Standard for Binary Floating-point Arithmetic. This article places their contents before the public for the first time. 10 references, 3 tables.

A standard for binary floating-point arithmetic is being proposed and there is a very real possibility that it will be adopted by many manufacturers and implemented on a wide range of computers. This development matters to all of us concerned with numerical software. One of the principal motivations for the standard is to distribute more evenly the burden of portability between hardware and software. At present, any program intended to be portable must be designed for a mythical computer that enjoys no capability not supported by every computer on which the program will be run. That mythical computer is so much grubbier than almost any real computer that a portable program will frequently be denigrated as "suboptimal" and then supplanted by another program supposedly "optimal" for the real computer in question but often inferior in critical respects like reliability. A standard --- almost any reasonable standard --- will surely improve the situation. A standard environment for numerical programs will promote fair comparisons and sharing of numerical codes, thereby lowering costs and prices. Furthermore, we have chosen repeatedly to enrich that environment in order that applications programs be simpler and more reliable. Thus will the onus of portability be shared among hardware manufacturers and software producers.

A standard for binary floating point arithmetic is briefly described. There is a very real possibility that it will be adopted by many manufacturers and implemented on a wide range of computers.