The ACM Curriculum Committee on Computer Education for Management last year issued a report containing a variety of curriculum recommendations for graduate professional programs in information systems [1]. The work of the Committee has been supported by the National Science Foundation.* A brief summary of the recommendations is given in the Proceedings of ACM 72 [2]. The report addresses the need for information systems programs as stand-alone offerings, or as part of Master's level education in graduate business schools, computer science departments, or other graduate departments. The implications of these recommendations for computer science departments may be addressed under three headings, depending on the role of the department as: (i) including offerings relevant to information systems in its regular Master's degree program; (ii) participating in the offering of an independent program leading to an MS degree in information systems, but as a collaborator with another unit, e.g. a business school; or (iii) undertaking to offer an independent program entirely on its own.

The evaluation of a function of one argument is a standard computational task. When an unnormalized number representation is used, it is appropriate that function evaluation to subject to certain “adjustment” criteria, defined independently of the computing method. In this paper some such criteria are developed, and their application described. In particular, consideration is given to questions of the extent to which general principles apply (i.e. for large classes of functions of a single argument) and the manner in which particular properties of the functions involved (e.g. the functions evaluated by standard library subroutines) may be invoked. The analysis, although framed in terms of unnormalized arithmetic, gives insight into the general nature of significance propagation through function evaluation, and provides a means for analyzing calculations carried out in the usual normalized arithmetic, particularly in the case where an “index of significance” is employed.

A particular set of unnormalized arithmetic operations termed ``basic'' are described, in the context of the University of Chicago Maniac III Computer. Each basic operation involves three operand words and generates two result words, all in unnormalized floating point format. The use of these operations in the implementation of multi-precision arithmetic is explained; in particular, it is demonstrated that multiprecision division can be effected in a nontentative manner with their aid.

Algorithms for floating point computer arithmetic are described, in which fractional parts are not subject to the usual normalization convention. These algorithms give results in a form which furnishes some indication of their degree of precision. An analysis of one-stage error propagation is developed for each operation; a suggested statistical model for long-run error propagation is also set forth.

The usual floating point arithmetic makes error analysis difficult. This paper describes an alternative system which offers a means of analyzing floating point calculations more effectively and which also possesses certain advantages from an equipment standpoint.