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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)
INTC 48.23+2.3%Feb 11 3:59 PM EST
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To: Martin Atkinson-Barr who wrote (20706)5/8/1997 4:48:00 PM
From: Dan Spillane   of 186894
 
Hi Martin, so you're almost famous. However, if I remember correctly from my studies on K&R "C" and ANSI "C", there are very specific rules related to "truncation" of floating point types, and resultant conversion to integer. In no case was an error flag supposed to be raised when a number is truncated. So, I'd be a little careful about making big news about what is not doubt the implementation for correct type conversion? I don't think this varies one little bit (pun intended) for other programming language implementations. And I can't see why a bit would be thrown in this case. Not sure why any program would want to use that flag as you suggest -- in fact, from a "C" program (without escaping the language) it is likely impossible, by the way...most of the PC software in the world today is written in "C/C++".

Your comments and further explanation are appreciated. Perhaps I don't understand what is the newest "tangential scare." You pointed out this error will only occurr with certain high-precision math packages. That doesn't concern most of the world.

You said yourself:
"Thus numeric software would always ignore this bit to check for errors unless it is highly specialized exact arithmetic"

...looks to me like your new theory makes this "bug" even LESS significant than first reported...not more as you suggest. Please convince me.

Dan
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