Real Inferno

Inferno is an operating system well suited to applications that need to be portable, graphical, and networked. This paper describes the fundamental oating point facilities of the system, including: tight rules on expression evaluation, binary/decimal conversion, exceptions and rounding, and the elementary function library. Although the focus of Inferno is interactive media, its portability across hardware and operating platforms, its relative simplicity, and its strength in distributed computing make it attractive for advanced scientic computing as well. Since the appearance of a new operating system is a relatively uncommon event, this is a special opportunity for numerical analysts to voice their opinion about what fundamental facilities they need. The purpose of this short paper is to describe numerical aspects of the initial release of Inferno, and to invite comment before the tyranny of backward compatibility makes changes impossible. Overviews can be found at http://inferno.be...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: QNS
• Authors: Eric Grosse
• Keywords: Elementary Function Library, Fundamental Oating Point, Operating System, QNS 1996, Software Engineering