Just for the record, Cobol has a long history of specifying local rounding options. More recently, the options for rounding are elaborated in the context of adding standard arithmetic.
http://www.cobolportal.com/j4/files/05-0152.doc Ralf > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Bjorn Lisper > [...] > He was very careful to give > the language a good design also regarding floating-point computations. His > design choice, as regards rounding, was to allow the compiler to choose > rounding mode by default (thus allowing more freedom for optimization), > while providing a set of special arithmetic operators, with specified > rounding modes, to use when more explicit control is needed. > > He also proposed a special construct "letctrl ... in e", where the "..." > are > a list of directives telling how to interpret and evaluate the expression > e. One possible directive is "RoundingMode = ..." to set the rounding mode > locally in e. Other directives control, for instance, whether > optimizations > like x*0.0 -> 0.0 are allowed in e, whether to force strict evaluation of > all subexpressions (so optimizations cannot affect exceptions), to set > allowed miminum accuracy, etc. > > The language has exception handling (including a "handle" construct to > catch > exceptions), which also takes care of floating-point exceptions. _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
