Efforts have been made to standardize interval arithmetic (IA) for over a decade. The reasons have been to enable more widespread use of the technology, to enable more widespread sharing and collaboration among researchers and developers of the technology, and to enable easier checking that computer codes have been correctly programmed. During the late 1990's, the first author of this report led such a project to introduce an interval data type into the Fortran language. One reason for failure of that effort was the Fortran language standardization committee's lack of familiarity with interval technology and consequent caution. Another was misunderstanding between the Fortran standardization committee's basic tenets on standardizing interline optimization and some views expressed by members of the interval analysis community. A third was confusion over how extended IA (arithmetic dealing with division by intervals that contain zero) should be handled. This was coupled with a heavy committee load associated with other projects, such as standardizing an interface for interoperability with "C" language programs.
展开▼
