- From: Kohsuke KAWAGUCHI <kohsuke.kawaguchi@eng.sun.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 14:49:03 -0700
- To: "Ashok Malhotra" <ashokma@microsoft.com>, www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
I really appreciate the time WG spent to discuss this issue, and I'm glad to know that the change will be made. However, I would be remiss if I say that the suggested change is enough. In Clinger's paper, section.8 "OVERFLOW AND UNDERFLOW", page.7, he says "In such cases, the computation may need to be repeated using some other algorithm, depending on the policies that have been established for handling overflow and underflow within the particular floating point number system in question." So practically it means nothing. Therefore the spec still has to state explicitly that how those cases shall be handled. (Underflow is currently not a problem, thanks to the current wording. But it may be possible that it becomes a problem under the modified wording.) That said, I beg WG to consider treating overflow/underflow as an error. Several programming languages (including C and Java) treat them as errors, whereas none treats them as +-INF as far as I know. In my understanding, +-INF are intended to represent arithmetic errors during the floating point value computation. ---- Kohsuke KAWAGUCHI Phone: 650-786-0721
Received on Friday, 13 April 2001 17:49:00 UTC