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Re: floating-point formats
- From: Roland McGrath <roland at frob dot com>
- To: Lars Brinkhoff <lars dot spam at nocrew dot org>
- Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat dot com>,libc-alpha at sources dot redhat dot com,Andy Phillips <atp at northernworkhouse dot co dot uk>
- Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 15:04:08 -0400 (EDT)
- Subject: Re: floating-point formats
> Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> writes:
> > I don't agree with this at all. Having one libc for all
> > architectures also includes providing comparable semantics which
> > means IEEE. Nothing else is acceptable since you cannot run any
> > program unmodified.
>
> The company I'm working for will most likely want to use glibc without
> IEEE floats. Do you mean that patches to do this would not be accepted
> by the glibc maintainers?
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.