Comment Re: Have these people never heard of IEEE754???? (Score 1) 240
In the cast of the boost-interval library, the link I posted has a very clear warning about that; so I don't understand why that quote is relevant here. This warning shows that "floating point is hard" and that is MORE reason to be careful with your intervals!
Warning! Guaranteed interval arithmetic for native floating-point format is not supported on every combination of processor, operating system, and compiler. This is a list of systems known to work correctly when using interval and interval with basic arithmetic operators.
x86-like hardware is supported by the library with GCC, Visual C++ 7.1, Intel compiler ( 8 on Windows), CodeWarrior ( 9), as long as the traditional x87 floating-point unit is used for floating-point computations (no -mfpmath=sse2 support).
Sparc hardware is supported with GCC and Sun compiler.
PowerPC hardware is supported with GCC and CodeWarrior, when floating-point computations are not done with the Altivec unit.
Alpha hardware is supported with GCC, except maybe for the square root. The options -mfp-rounding-mode=d -mieee have to be used.
The previous list is not exhaustive. And even if a system does not provide guaranteed computations for hardware floating-point types, the interval library is still usable with user-defined types and for doing box arithmetic.