Floating-point arithmetic

The IEEE 754 standard for floating-point arithmetic was revised in 2008. The main new features are some new formats for decimal computations, and the recommendation of correctly rounded transcendental functions. The new decimal formats should not have an impact on our work, since we either use integer-only arithmetic, or arbitrary-precision binary floating-point arithmetic through the GNU MPFR library.

A new standard (P1788) is currently under construction for interval arithmetic. We are not officially involved in this standard, but we follow the discussions, to check in particular that the proposed standard will also cover arbitrary precision (interval) arithmetic.