


my apologies in advance if this is trivial and/or non-sense, but I did not find the answer in a quick scan of David Goldberg's "What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic", nor in other more specifically IEEE-754 documents that I have.

consider the effect of first rounding (round-to-nearest-even) to some number of bits, followed by another rounding to a smaller number of bits, the question is is that always the same as directly rounding to the smaller number of bits.

is the following observation mathematically (round-to-nearest-even) correct:

the commas are for readability, the semicolons indicate where rounding is to take place:

1.aaaa0,10000;0xxx ==> 1.aaaa0,10000 1.aaaa0;10000 ==> 1.aaaa0 round to 10 bits, followed by round to 5 1.aaaa0;10000,0xxx ==> ==> 1.aaaa1 directly round to 5 bits

(the "0xxx", and "0000,0xxx" are some of the bits of some mathematically exact result which are not all zeros, which would be represented by a non-zero "sticky bit" in an actual hardware implementation. In the first case the sticky bit gets truncated, in the second case the sticky bit causes a round upwards.)

if the above is a correct observation, then


which seems sort of counter-intuitive, at least I started out thinking it would always be, but thought I had better prove it first, and then came up with this counter example. If it is true, I wonder if it is well known or not.

Peter Lawrence.

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