Public Comment Number PC-UK0129 ISO/IEC CD 9899 (SC22N2620) Public Comment =========================================== Date: 1998-02-25 Author: N.M Maclaren Author Affiliation: Self Postal Address: University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB3 3QG, United Kingdom E-mail Address: Telephone Number: +44 1223 334761 Fax Number: +44 1223 334679 Number of individual comments: 1 Comment 1. Category: Normative change to existing feature retaining the original intent Committee Draft subsection: 7.6 Title: Failure when handling exception flags Detailed description: These specifications do not allow the implementation any way to indicate failure. This is adequate for strict IEEE arithmetic, but is a hostage to fortune and prevents their use for several IEEE-like arithmetics. All such implementations can do is to not define the macros, thus implying that they cannot support the functions, whereas they may be able to support all reasonable use of the functions and merely fail in some perverse circumstances. One actual example of this is that they are often not fully resettable in signal handlers, because the return from the handler may reset them to the values they had on entry! It would be reasonable for an implementation to make these functions fail when called within such a handler, as I have done when implementing similar functions under such circumstances, but the current wording does not permit this. I think that they should all be integer-valued functions, and return an error indicator.