[TAG] Paul Sephton's article "A Question Of Rounding"

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2007-10-03 08:09:51 -0500, Ben Okopnik wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 01:12:04PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > Isn't anyone there who reviews the submitted articles?
> 
> You're always welcome to volunteer and improve our review process
> instead of just bitching about it. Anyone can do the latter, and I give
> this kind of nonsense the amount of respect that it deserves - i.e.,
> none. If you expect a (very) small number of volunteers to be
> universally competent in every possible area of programming, Open Source
> issues, hardware, astronomy, cooking, and nuclear science, you've got a
> little rethinking to do. Significantly more than the author of this
> article would even if he was wrong, in fact.

That was just a question. I really do neither know the number of
volunteers nor the review process (I found this article just because
it was mentioned on the bug report). But perhaps you can find external
volunteers.

> Vincent, so far, the people who have complained about this article have
> almost all been the same people that participated in that bug report
> (and flamed Paul for asking questions.)

Paul wasn't flamed *for asking questions*, but for not listening to
arguments of other people.

> I note that even you yourself admitted in that "discussion" that there's
> a problem:
> 
> ``
> "People are working to make it better. Since you need an arithmetic for
> financial applications, you should know that work has been done in this
> way: decimal floating-point, with some specific functions, defined in
> IEEE754r. But the glibc doesn't support them yet (and decimal support is
> quite recent and incomplete in GCC)."
> ''

Yes, but this doesn't make Paul's article correct. If he can fix his
article, then this would be fine (much information has been given in
the bug report, as well as pointers to external documents); but most
of it is wrong, in particular the whole conclusion.

-- 
Vincent Lef?vre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)