[Om3] Language Dictionaries (Was: Re: Initializing OM3 at 2013 Process)

[David Carlisle]

On 05/05/2014 10:28, Lars Hellström wrote:

> 1. More IEEE float formats.
>
> OM currently only supports the 64-bit double format for floats, but
> the current version of the source IEEE standard defines floats of
> arbitrarily high precision (every multiple of 32 bits, if I recall
> correctly; there's a formula for how many bits go into the exponent
> and how many go into the mantissa). The OM standard could be extended
> to allow OMF with hex attribute values any multiple of 8 hexdigits
> long. (https://trac.mathweb.org/OM3/ticket/137)
>
> A natural translation of some
>
> <OMF hex="0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF"/>
>
> (128 bits) to strict OM2 would be as some
>
> <OMA> <OMS cd="IEEEfloat" name="fromOMB"/>
> <OMB>ASNFZ4mrze8BI0VniavN7w==</OMB> </OMA>

I much prefer the existing OMS notation for that. There always were
different formats for floating point numbers so could have used a CD for
all of them, OMF special cased Double as a convenience as that was (and
is) overwhelmingly the most common type for floating point literals
in programming languages. I don't think the extended precision types
change that reasoning any more than IEEE single. This is a cosmetic
change that breaks applications unless they are updated or the code is
pre-processed back to OM2.


> 2. OMOBJs as mathematical objects

I thought we had a meta CD for that, but apparently not (or at least we
don't seem to have one now?) meta CD allows the quoting of CDs (only)
I'm sure at one time we had a CD with symbols OMOBJ OMA etc.

David