Facundo Batista <facundo@taniquetil.com.ar> wrote:

...

Am I losing my marbles, or is this a proposal to add the logical operations to FLOATING-POINT?

Sort of. This is a proposal to keep compliant with the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification, as we promised.

http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/

Or, more precisely: http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/damisc.html All right. Neither you nor I have lost our marbles, but the authors of that assuredly did. It's totally insane. And implementing it for a software emulation of that specification built on top of a twos complement binary integer model is insanity squared. But promises are promises and mere insanity is not in itself an obstacle to political success .... I shall attempt to forget that I ever asked the question :-) Regards, Nick Maclaren, University of Cambridge Computing Service, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England. Email: nmm1@cam.ac.uk Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679