Floating Point and Composite Arithmetics

The widespread adoption of the IEEE/ISO standard for binary floating point arithmetic has brought a measure of order to the chaos of technical computation. Persistent complaints about claculator design, spreadsheet implementations, and about computational software generally, demonstrate that general computation suffers from the lack of similar support. Composite arithmetic, as outlined in a paper recently published by the IEEE, addresses these broader issues. However, composite arithmetic could also be a basis for inproving technical programs. This paper contrats the use of floating point arithmetic and composite arithmetic in technical computation.