Joel C. Salomon:
> On the 754r mailing list, the HPC crowd was *very* insistent that static modes be explicitly in the standard.

Because in technology lot of things aren't determined on technological merits, but by politics, money and power. Sometimes behind some of the best things you can find around us there's the insistent work of very few people. For example we have to say a big THANK YOU to the personal work, political too, of few people like Knuth, for today having good floating point numbers/operations on all computers.

Bye,
bearophile

bearophile wrote:
> Joel C. Salomon:
>> On the 754r mailing list, the HPC crowd was *very* insistent that static modes be explicitly in the standard.
> 
> Because in technology lot of things aren't determined on technological merits, but by politics, money and power. Sometimes behind some of the best things you can find around us there's the insistent work of very few people. For example we have to say a big THANK YOU to the personal work, political too, of few people like Knuth, for today having good floating point numbers/operations on all computers.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

Interesting article on the history of 754: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html

  -- Daniel