Language-Independent Arithmetic

[Alastair Reid]

On Sunday 22 June 2003 6:30 am, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
> From the Haskell 98 Report, sec. 6.4:
>
>     "The default floating point operations defined by
>     the Haskell  Prelude do not  conform to current
>     language independent arithmetic (LIA) standards.
>     These standards require considerably more complexity
>     in the numeric structure and have thus been
>     relegated to a library."
>
> Is this true? Which library?

If I recall correctly, the LIA standard requires control over rounding modes, 
requires that you provide several variants of each comparision operation 
which respond differently to +0,-0,infinity,NaN, etc.  I think some of the 
obvious type signatures would have to change too.

What would be needed to conform to LIA would be to add a library providing all 
the operations.   The default ops (i.e., the Prelude) would still not conform 
to LIA but that may not be such a big deal.

--
Alastair Reid