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There was actually no "thought" being put into the IEEE spec as such. It was merely a codification of the design of the Intel FPU (only one of many, very differ
by andrepd 6mo ago
There was actually no "thought" being put into the IEEE spec as such. It was merely a codification of the design of the Intel FPU (only one of many, very different implementations of FP units pre-standardisation). There was thought put into that implementation, but the "standard" is merely a codification of that design.
It has many many warts, and many design choices were made given the constraints of hardware of that time, not by considerations in terms of a standard.
- jmalicki 6mo agoWilliam Kahan would beg to differ on this. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754st...
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo agohe would, but he very much designed the standard around the idea that if you wanted to implement a floating point algorithm you would hire him.