Oct 18, 2026, 6:07 PMYes.
I think the point is that the IEEE committee added the parts about _extended_ formats to the standard at least in part to reflect Intel's work on the 80-bit format for the 8087.
If I recall correctly, such extended formats are separate from the "main sequence" of 32-64-128-bit formats.
Again, this is all from memory, so don't take my word for it.
@vnikolov @dougmerritt @kenshirriff That is how I learned it. My memory says that I got that from my former supervisor Siegfried Rump, but it might have been another person, even Beresford Parlett.
@jpmzemke
Parlett was a high powered guy. I see we just lost him in February at age 94 (!). At Berkeley he was chair of C.S., and "He was the author of many influential papers on the numerical solution of eigenvalue problems, the QR algorithm, the Lanczos algorithm, symmetric indefinite systems, and sparse matrix computations.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beresford_Parlett
Rump is head of the Institute for Reliable Computing (great topic).
> What is research?
> Yesterday I finished a proof,
> Today I found a flaw.
> I had a pleasant night.
https://www.tuhh.de/ti3/rump/
The history is clearly complicated and interesting, and I certainly don't know all of it.
Back in the day, even before IEEE 754 was implemented, I was following the work of Kahan, whose research and writings I admired, and I worked with a (later, less famous) head of the 754 committee, Dick Delp, which gives me one perspective, but I claim no expertise; I just have a long interest.
Come to think of it, I should clarify that I have even *less* expertise than may be implied by the above. And interest is certainly never the same as knowledge.
Oct 18, 2026, 6:49 PMI appreciate this information.
Needless to say, Kahan's work is worth reading indeed.
Just in case it isn't redundant, this is another good paper:
David Goldberg
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
(1991)
One place is
<https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html>.
@vnikolov
> David Goldberg
> What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (1991)
Not only not redundant, it's a "must read" classic.
What it says is *still* not widely enough known.
Thanks for the link.
Oct 19, 2026, 1:08 AM@dougmerritt @vnikolov @jpmzemke @kenshirriff Based on the common error patterns, very clearly a lot of the folks building frontier machine learning systems haven’t read it.