Numbers and Pork Rinds

["Guillermo J. Rozas" <jinx@hpesogg.hp.com>]

	But I think I am about to run out of steam.  Alan and I have aired
	our views pretty thoroughly, tying up a lot of mailboxes in the process.
	Hey, all you out there: does anyone else care?  Has anyone's mind been
	changed as a result of our discussion?

Some of us have been mostly quiet because Alan has been doing a good
job of representing what we've come to accept (I argued fiercely
against Alan's/Will's notion of MIN and MAX a few months ago at MIT,
but I saw the light later).

The only additional constraint that I would like to see is that
SUP/MAX round up and INF/MIN round down when the relevant extreme is
exact, the implementation cannot determine that an exact answer is
correct, and thus the returned answer must be inexact.

Since (by Alan's argument) it is not correct for SUP/MAX to return the
exact argument (except in those implementations that can prove that
the exact answer is in fact the SUP/MAX), we cannot expect that the
answer will always be = to one of the arguments.  We can, however,
still provide an answer that is guaranteed to be no smaller.  Hence
the constraint.

    I'll bet most people haven't been paying attention.  I fully expect to have
    to repeat this entire argument every six months for the rest of my life.

No.  Hopefully the archives will still be around, and you can just
mail the whole discussion.  Perhaps if they make it through it they
deserve to discuss it with you.