[om] OM Floats (XML Representation)

[Bill Naylor]

>
> Before you take too much guidance from Java, you might also look at
>
> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
>
> which contains a paper, "How Java's floating point hurts everyone
> everywhere".
>

interesting,

> It is my own view that the goals of clean algebraic specification and
> practical floating point
> computation are probably irreconcilable, my own efforts included.  Over
> the years
> I have written a number of papers relating IEEE floats and computer
> algebra, all of which
> have been rejected by ISSAC program committee members as being irrelevant to
> computer algebra. Maybe they are right, that they are mutually
> exclusive.  In which
> case maybe OM should just encapsulate IEEE floats as some kind of
> foreign object.
>

I guess we shouldn't forget that the goal of OpenMath is as a
communication language for general mathematical objects, not just
exact objects in a computer algebra system. The OMF element provides a
handy way of dealing with 'common or garden' IEEE floats. If you want more
accuracy, there's always the bigfloat1 CD.

> (In case you wonder about what those papers might be about,
> one can use signed infinities nicely in  interval arithmetic, and for
> retrospective
> diagnostics. I think they are all on line.

can you give a URL?

>
> I don't know if there is an OM CD for intervals yet.)

there is the CD interval1, which is in the MathML core CDGroup. It does
little more than allow you to construct intervals of various types,

Bill
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