[Boost-announce] [boost] Floating Point Utilities Review Result

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-03-08 11:06:04

Floating Point Utilities Review Result.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were 6 positive reviews and no negative ones, so Johan Rade's  
Floating
Point Utility library has been accepted into Boost.

The main issues and topics that came up for discussion were:

1)  A couple of minor bugs were uncovered relating to signed NaN testing
when using the SSE2 registers, and deserialising NaN's: both were fixed
during the review period.

2)  We had a discussion about the usefulness or otherwise of signed  
NaN's
and the changesign function: Johan agreed to drop support for these  
as the
signbit of NaN's is not considered part of the NaN payload and need  
not be
preserved by the compiler, this could usefully be summarised in a  
rationale:
especially now that negative NaN's are not formatted with a "-" sign?

3)  JM made a few quite fruitless suggestions about optimising away  
calls to
memcpy: this should be documented in a rationale to prevent JM from  
making
the same mistake again :-)

4) John Phillips raised the issue of finding these tools - making  
sure that
they don't get lost amongst all the other special functions and  
"stuff" in
Boost.Math.  JM and Johan have agreed to work together to ensure this
doesn't happen.

5)  There were a couple of suggestions for a convenience function for
installing the facets in a locale/iostream: Johan agreed to add this.

6)  There was +1 vote for manipulators rather than flags to the facet
constructors - further investigation suggested this was problematic in a
header only library - so the suggestion was dropped.

7)  There was one comment about the library not using quickbook for
documentation: ideally it would be nice to see this fixed so that the  
docs
integrate seamlessly with the rest of Boost.Math - but see #4 as well.

Many thanks to Johan for making these utilities available.

John Maddock.
Review Manager for the Floating Point Utilities.

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