[simonbyrne]

I disagree about practical and accessible:

- its exposition is complicated (trying to prove everything in a general base makes it difficult to understand)

- it's woefully out of date (lack of guard digits haven't been an issue for at least 25 years, extended precision hasn't been an issue for the past 10 or so, and most languages now default to having fairly strict floating point semantics)

- it gets bogged down in irrelevant minutiae (rounding modes and exception flags, while available in modern hardware, aren't really supported by any modern languages/compilers)

- it doesn't really provide any practical advice (it barely mentions binary-decimal conversion, it jumps to doubling precision and Kahan summation without suggesting any intermediate steps such as sorted or pairwise summation).

But my biggest complaint is the frequency with which users are referred to it on StackOverflow as if (1) it is a good way to learn about floating point concepts, and (2) anyone using floating point numbers should be expected to understand it all.

[fargle]

I don't even disagree from a purist standpoint. And yes, I think everyone should read it. But they won't all, and don't need to, understand it.

But um, so a sophomoric summary without the "complications" of proving it is NOT better nor more accessible.

And I see none of your bullet points are improved upon in the linked paper.