Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!strath-cs!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!memex!peter From: peter@memex.co.uk (Peter Ilieve) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: IEE754 floating point `rationale': Summary Message-ID: <398@memex.co.uk> Date: 21 Feb 91 17:00:31 GMT Reply-To: peter@memex.co.uk (Peter Ilieve) Organization: Memex Ltd., East Kilbride, Scotland Lines: 104 I asked if there was a `rationale' document describing the background to IEEE754 floating point. After asking, I realised I had an as yet unread copy of Hennessey & Patterson at home and that had several references in it. Here is the summary of replies I received, and the things from H&P. The standard was discussed in Computer before it was finalised. The references I have are: Jerome T. Coonen, An Implementation Guide to a Proposed Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, Computer, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp68--79, Jan 1980 Discusses an early draft of the standard. D. Hough, Applications of the proposed standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, Computer, Vol. 13 No. 1, Jan 1980 A Proposed Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic, Computer, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp51--62, March 1981. Draft 8.0 of the standard, with introductory comments by David Stevenson (who was Chairman of the working group) and examples by Jerome T. Coonen. These January 1980 and March 1981 Computer issues probably contain other papers on this as well, the above are the only ones I have specifics for. The more general, radix independent, version, IEEE854 was discussed in: W. J. Cody, et. al. (another 9), A Proposed radix- and word-length-independent standard for floating-point arithmetic, IEEE Micro Vol. 4 No. 4, pp86--100, August 1984. This contains a draft of IEEE854, with commentary, which is also applicable to 754. The standard itself references: Jerome T. Coonen, Contributions to a Proposed Standard for Binary Floating- Point Arithmetic, Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1984. This appears to be the seminal work on decimal<->binary conversions. The rest of them (in no particular order): William D. Clinger, How to read floating-point numbers accurately Guy L. Steele Jr. & Jon L. White, How to print floating-point numbers accurately. Both in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '90 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, also published as SIGPLAN Notices Volume 25 Number 6 D. Goldberg, Floating-point and computer systems, Xerox Technical Report CSL-89-9, 1989. Also to appear in Computing Surveys. Contains an in-depth tutorial on the standard from the software point of view. John L. Hennessey & David A. Patterson, Computer Architecture: a quantitive approach, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1990, ISBN 1-55880-069-8. Contains an appendix by David Goldberg on computer arithmetic, with quite a lot on floating-point. Sterbenz, Floating-point Computation, Prentice-Hall, 1974 W. J. Cody, Floating point standards: Theory and Practice, in Reliability in Computing: The Role of Interval Methods in Scientific Computing, R. E. Moore (ed.), Academic Press, 1988, pp99--107. Presents a status of hardware and software implementations of the standard. E. Swartzlander (ed.), Computer Arithmetic, Dowden, Hutchison and Ross, 1980. A collection of historical papers, including one by S. F. Anderson, et. al, about the IBM 360/91 floating-point unit. D. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2, 2nd Ed. Has sections on floating-point in chapter 4 on arithmetic. Apple Numerics Manual, Addison-Wesley, 1986 Sun Numerical Computation Guide. I assume this is the successor to Sun's Floating Point Programmer's Guide, which was part of the standard documentation up to and including 4.0.3, even though it didn't describe the 4.0.3 software. I think it has now been `closed up' as part of Sun's unbundled compilers documetation. Thanks to: Dan Bernstein, brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu Keith Bierman, khb@eng.sun.com gideony@microsoft.uucp David G. Hough, dgh@validgh.com Sam Quiring, sbq@verdix.com Dan Rabin, rabin-dan@cs.yale.edu dik t. winter, dik@cwi.nl Peter Ilieve peter@memex.co.uk Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com