Maciej Stachowiak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 14/07/2008 22:32:02: > 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.
Yes that's a good example (and decNumber is in fact a component of ICU). You can really think of it as providing an alternative to the hardware instructions on machine which don't have decimal floating-point hardware yet. And yes, the relevant standard is the new IEEE 754. decNumber is very platform-independent; I test it on both big-endian and little-endian machines, and Nelson Beebe has it running on more than 20 flavors of Unix. It is also in GCC, where it is used for implementing the new C decimal floating-point datatypes. For lots more specifications and details of implementation, hardware architecture documents, etc., see: http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/#links Mike Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
