Re: [boost] status of interval library?

From: Herve Bronnimann (hbr_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-06-19 10:06:56

On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 11:07:25PM -0500, Dan'l Miller wrote:
>   What is the status of the interval arithmetic library?

It seems like lots of people need this interval library, me too.
I discussed with Jens a few months ago, and got permission to work on
it with the goal of a public review and final integration into boost.
As I am in academia, and not industry, I hired a student and a post-doc
working on it, and they're very good, so I expect there'll be a public
review by the end of the summer.

To give you a little bit of inside information, the reason it wasn't
submitted was that there were many nitpicks, including faulty
transcendental functions (acos for one). This was due to the lack of
rounding mode guarantees at the level of acos and others (although all
the internal operations were done with the proper rounding mode). There
must have been many other reasons. Let me quote Jens on this:

  "First, I haven't had time for quite some time :-)

  Second, there are still a few areas where my library isn't
  exactly ready.  For example, it isn't exactly portable,
  because e.g. IEEE does not give a precision for the
  trig functions, so the "enclosing" characteristic for
  the interval trig functions as presented in my library
  is occasionally violated.
  
  I don't know of a good way to achieve this portably,
  yet get some speed.
  
  Feel free to take over the library from me, put on some
  final polish, read the boost submission guidelines, and
  shepherd the library through formal review."

>   By the way, the http://www.rhein-main.de/people/jmaurer/interval.tar.gz link is broken at http://www.mscs.mu.edu/~georgec/IFAQ/maurer1.html
 
That I have no control of. But I would relocate the FAQ into the
documentation of the library prior to public review, so this will be the
time to fix it.

Best,
-- 
Hervé