Fourth Draft "Unsafe fp optimizations" project description.

[Stephen L Moshier]

> THat's a little fierce. It is true that some companies have ignored
> denormals (notably Alpha -- to be discontinued in 2004, and SGI/MIPS --
> with SGI stock at 50 cents, destined to play a smaller role in the
> future of high end numerical computing I fear :-)
> 
> However, most architectures do adequately support denormals.

You seem to be limiting the universe of "architectures" to a small
handful of major brands that add up to a minority of the total
computer population.  For counterexample there are legions, untold
billions, of embedded processors, DSP chips, PIC chips and so on whose
manufacturers supply or recommend non-IEEE math.  GCC has started to
get ports to some of them, and we have to support, or decide not to
support, the various arithmetic peculiarities.  It would be better if
the IEEE committee were willing to survey the real world and try to
bring these variants together.  But it looks like the committee stands
to be widely ignored for the next 15 years, just as it has been
ignored for the last 15 years.