Re: floating-point formats

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 12:04, Roland McGrath wrote:

> I don't really understand Ulrich's remark here.  The only cases that I was
> talking about are machines where the native FP format is something other
> than IEEE (e.g. Vax, PDP-10).  It doesn't make sense to me to attempt to
> impose IEEE format on an ABI for such machines.  Any programs written to
> run on that machine under an existing compiler/library will expect the
> machine's native FP semantics rather than universally compatible IEEE
> semantics.

Then use whatever environment you have today.  When you use glibc you
want to have an API compatible with the rest of the systems using glibc
and those are using IEEE.  Anything defeats the purpose.

In addition, maintaining code to be aware of other FP formats (or byte
sizes) is adding additional work on the maintainer.  I have no interest
in having to do even more for effectively no gain.  Who cares about
hardware which can be outperformed by a pocket calculator?  The people
who want such extravagence have to pay the price.

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