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From: thomson@uthub.UUCP (Brian Thomson)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: IBM 360 float architecture problems
Message-ID: <222@uthub.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Jul-85 09:49:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: uthub.222
Posted: Thu Jul 25 09:49:43 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jul-85 11:42:13 EDT
References: <741@masscomp.UUCP>, <744@masscomp.UUCP>
Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto
Lines: 14
Keywords: Oops

> One (alleged) advantage 
> of chopped (as opposed to rounded) arithmetic is that you can never
> overflow on a conversion of double -> single precision, given that
> the number of exponent bits is the same. The only time this could 
> occur is at the very edges of the dynamic range of representable
> numbers.

Since the rounded result is more accurate, it should be argued that
in such a situation overflow is the preferred result.  The defence
of "it's not a bug it's a feature" was probably invented by a
marketing department.
-- 
		    Brian Thomson,	    CSRI Univ. of Toronto
		    {linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,utzoo}!utcsrgv!uthub!thomson