(j3.2006) BEQ, BNE?

[Van Snyder]

On Wed, 2013-01-30 at 23:15 +0000, Whitlock, Stan wrote:
> That remark is just not productive.  What is your goal here?  To find
> changes to the standard that you can put your name on?  It is never a
> good idea to delete something from the standard.  If it's been
> implemented, then guaranteed, someone is using it and the vendor can't
> delete it.

It was a facetious remark, aimed at the assertion that adding two
trivial and useful intrinsic functions is too much work, from the author
of two useful but equally redundant ones as part of the same project at
which the present proposal is aimed.

> And arguing about decades old hardware might be fun over a beer but it
> serves no useful purpose for the standard.  If someone resurrects this
> old hardware support and it is commercially successful, you can add
> BEQ and BNE to Fortran 2050.  Right now, it just generates annoying
> e-mail.

BEQ and BNE would have long-term lower labor cost, both for application
developers and processor developers, compared to using such idioms as
BLE(I,J) .and. BLE(J,I) or POPCNT(IEOR(I,J)) == 0, independently of
whether I==J wrongly produces .true. for I=+0 and J=-0.

It is not inceiveable that a processor using ones-complement integer
representation will be developed again, especially as a GPU/DSP/FPGA,
since negation requires one less step (no carry needed).  We shouldn't
be encouraging developers to write code that is guaranteed to fail if
and when that happens.

> /Stan
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org [mailto:j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org] On Behalf Of Van Snyder
> Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2013 3:24 PM
> To: longb at cray.com
> Cc: fortran standards email list for J3
> Subject: Re: (j3.2006) BEQ, BNE?
> 
> On Wed, 2013-01-30 at 07:33 -0600, Bill Long wrote:
> > If I recall, the goal was to add the actually useful cases while 
> > trying to limit the ever-expanding list of intrinsics.
> 
> Perhaps we should delete BGT and BGE, since BGT == .NOT. BLE, and BGE == .NOT. BLT
> 
> 
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