Re: Math Update for Ada 2005

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net>]

On 23 Dec 2001, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Ada 95 was carefully designed so that support can be
> added for infinities and Nan's without in anyway violating
> the RM semantics, and in fact GNAT does support the use of
> Inf and Nan semantics in full generality, though it does
> not provide all the IEEE facilities for manipulating such
> values.
>
> These facilities can be added with external packages. For
> an *extensive* discussion of this entire issue see Sam
> Figueroa's thesis (NYU, Robert Dewar thesis advisor). This
> thesis addresses the entire issue of floating-point evaluation schemes
> in high level languages from an IEEE
> point of view, and specifically proposes a package and
> other facilities (pragmas attributes etc) for full support
> of the IEEE model in Ada 95 in an upwards compatible manner.
>
> At least start from Sam's work, don't reinvent the wheel :-)


Excellent advice, thanks. I'll answer the next question for the clueless

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/csweb/Research/Theses/figueroa_sam.pdf

-- Brian