> nothing in IEEE-754 requires that this state be global. In the C language bindings, for example, dynamic rounding mode and status flags have thread scope. My

> nothing in IEEE-754 requires that this state be global. In the C language bindings, for example, dynamic rounding mode and status flags have thread scope. My example, RegExp captures in JavaScript, also have thread scope. Thread local global state is still not good. What makes the flags global is that access to them is provided implicitly and ubiquitously, independent of scope. All the operations as well as the flag functions like saveAllFlags are given read and/or write access and none of them take arguments that control the scope of the flags they're manipulating. They get pulled from thin air. This is problematic. I deliberately never say that the rounding flags are global, my strawmen are that they're either lexically or dynamically scoped, both of which are problematic. > You can take "block" to mean whatever makes sense for your language: it could be a single arithmetic operation[1] or it could be the whole program (though it's more useful if it isn't). What I'm arguing is that there is no interpretation of "block" that yields a satisfying result. I didn't consider applying it to individual operations because the whole motivation for the rounding mode mechanism is to keep the same mode is in effect across multiple operations. The lack of hardware support suggests the same thing. Maybe you can give an example of how you see this working where the attributes are more tightly scoped than per-thread? > Finally, the concern about "exceptions" is entirely misplaced. "Exception" in IEEE-754 simply means "an event that occurs when an operation on some particular operands has no outcome suitable for every reasonable application," which is a rather different meaning than the way "exception" is understood in colloquial PL usage. Fair enough, though that introduces a new problem: how do you implement fp-exceptions if the're not language level exceptions? But maybe if a reasonable solution can be found for the rounding flags something like that would work for the exceptions too. > I would encourage you to direct questions like these about the spec to committee members. If you work for a big company, a few members probably work with you. If you don't, most committee members are happy to answer questions, even from people they don't know. I did, I raised some of these issues, including the licensing issue, with David Bindel a year ago.