Re 1: it is true that there is a single paragraph "discussing" rounding in https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64/blob/master/dec64.... -- which is not much. If there is more, I did not find it, and would genuinely appreciate a pointer! In the meantime, though, alternative rounding methods are missing, and those can be quite important for both scientific and business computations. I guess they could be added. But, a lot of things "could be done". Fact is, they were done so far. In so far, DEC64 is mostly a proposal for people to sit down and work out an actual standard. Perhaps this will happen one day, but it seems so far not so many people are convinced it's worth investing efforts into that (I am also not sure if the author is interested in feedback and collaboration? I see no indication for that anywhere)
Re 2: these are at best toy implementations, at worst dangerous (in the sense that they may provide wildly inaccurate results, due to convergence
Re 3: agreed. Though there is still a gargantuan number of values which have 2 or more representations, and that makes all kinds of comparisons more complicated. Dealing with that efficiently in SW is difficult, and more so in HW. It might be worth it if the advantages outweigh it, but at least I personally don't see it.
Re 4: if it can be "undoubtedly improved with effort", why hasn't it been done in several years? Sure, it may be possible, but I will keep my doubts for the time being :-)
> In the meantime, though, alternative rounding methods are missing, and those can be quite important for both scientific and business computations.
My inexpert understanding is that modifying rounding modes is super niche and poorly supported by most things, so this doesn't strike me as much of a problem. A saner replacement to rounding mode flags would just be to offer different operations for those rare cases they are wanted.
> Dealing with that efficiently in SW is difficult, and more so in HW.
Not really; you never really need to normalize values and not doing so makes basically everything other than comparisons cheaper. I don't see how normalizing around every arithmetic operation would make the hardware any simpler.
> if it can be "undoubtedly improved with effort", why hasn't it been done in several years?
Because this is one guy's project and it hasn't seen much (any?) use.
Re 2: these are at best toy implementations, at worst dangerous (in the sense that they may provide wildly inaccurate results, due to convergence
Re 3: agreed. Though there is still a gargantuan number of values which have 2 or more representations, and that makes all kinds of comparisons more complicated. Dealing with that efficiently in SW is difficult, and more so in HW. It might be worth it if the advantages outweigh it, but at least I personally don't see it.
Re 4: if it can be "undoubtedly improved with effort", why hasn't it been done in several years? Sure, it may be possible, but I will keep my doubts for the time being :-)
I agree with you on 5, 6 and 7.