[boost] Re: Formal Review for Interval Library beginning

From: Gennadiy Rozental (gennadiy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-09-04 03:18:45

"Herve Bronnimann" <hbr_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:20020904030444.GC4722_at_geometry.poly.edu...
> While I agree it would be nice to have all those things, we did not
> write a library for such a purpose (which IMHO is a totally different
> and more time-consuming endeavor).
>
> You have to judge the library by what it CAN do and not what it CANNOT
> do. Otherwise, many of the great boost libraries might not have been
> included in boost to start with.  Just because the Graph library does
> not have a module for representing and manipulating finite automata and
> neural networks doesn't make it useless. Far from it.

No offence, but I would not be comparing complexity and flexibility
Boost.Graph library and your submission. IMHO.
Each one has it's own domain. What I question here is that your submission
is flexible enough to cover most of the problems in interval arithmetic
domain.
Your answer is that it does not supposed to cover most of the problems and
there are (or will be) other libraries that will cover rest. My concern is
that I do not see to much differences between what is covered and what is
not in terms both functionality and importance.

> > Even more simple example: How you going to
> > represent result of operation 1/x where x = [-1, 1]?
>
> Well, in the framework of intervals, it's [-inf, inf]. And quite rightly
> so.

Even though 1/x never be equal to any value in (-1,1)? Unfortunately I do
not have recent experience that would require interval arithmetic. Could you
provide several real-life examples of intended uses of the library and
particularly where the above result would be "quite rightly so"?.

Also could other boosters share their experience with need of interval/range
arithmetic so we could see the domain under discussion.
Two items that already arose are :
1. Static analysis
2. Inequation solving

Gennadiy.