[Om3] Floats

[Professor James Davenport]

On Thu, February 24, 2011 5:46 pm, Lars Hellström wrote:
> Two things about floats in OM that I just recalled:
>
> 1. The endianness of floats in hex representation is unclear; the text
> says
> one thing, but the example given has the opposite endianness. I've filed a
> bug about that once.
I think you're right: the example given, 3ddb7cdfd9d7bdbb, is SUN-endian,
which is not my interpretation of the text.
> 2. The standard only covers 64-bit (I think it was) IEEE floats, but the
> current IEEE 754 standard defines 32n-bit floats for all integers n>=4.
> (Cf.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008#Interchange_formats) Someone
> might want to consider similarly extending the OM floats.
I'm probably not close enough to IEEE_754-2008 to suggest a defnitive
answer, but maybe a 'length' attribute as well (and removing the 16 hex
characters restriction).

James Davenport
Lecturer on XX10190 and CM30070
Hebron & Medlock Professor of Information Technology, University of Bath
OpenMath Content Dictionary Editor and Programme Chair, OpenMath 2009
IMU Committee on Electronic Information and Communication
Engineering & Science Board, Council of the British Computer Society
Federal Council, International Foundation for Computational Logic