Unum II announcement

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 24 February 2016 at 20:59:20 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> Unums represent either single numbers or entire segments and 
> those segments are not closed under the arithmetic operations, 
> so without a efficient representation for sets, Unums are not 
> useful as a more rigorous replacement for floating point 
> numbers.

I don't know if Unums are more useful than interval arithmetics, 
but without the 2008 edition of IEEE754 you cannot even represent 
interval arithmetics using floats AFAIK!

The basic idea for Unums seems that you get an estimate of the 
bounds and then recompute using higher precision or better 
algorithm when necessary. With regular floats you just get a 
noisy value and you need much more heavy machinery to know 
whether you need to recompute using a better algorithm/higher 
precision.