On Jul 14, 2008, at 1:46 PM, Mike Shaver wrote: > On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Mike Cowlishaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: >> (The decNumber code is quite stable, for example -- averaging fewer >> than one >> detected bug/year since its first release in 2001, is used in >> numerous IBM, >> SAP, and other vendors' products, and is part of the verification >> suite for >> power.org, PowerPC, and IBM mainframe hardware.) > > I have no doubt; it's more whether the spec is sufficiently detailed > and clear that someone can work from it and produce an interoperable > implementation without using the same software impl. Otherwise the > spec can just include the decNumber source in an appendix, I guess. :)
I'd agree with the point of concern here. The risk is not bugs in decNumber but that the spec might not match what it does, or may not be sufficiently detailed to allow an independent interoperable implementation. However, if decNumber implements something specified in an independent standard (there's an IEEE standard for decimal floating point, isn't there?), then I don't think this should count against two implementations both using decNumber. For example, both Gecko and WebKit use ICU but I would still count them as independent implementations of HTML and CSS, since the shared component is only used to implement the underlying Unicode standard, not the HTML and CSS standards themselves. Regards, Maciej _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
