Re: One more oddity with gcc and vax floats...

On 6/10/26 18:34, Mouse wrote:
>>> Why couldn't hardware floating point do much of the work?
>> Because if you want IEEE functionality, you need to use IEEE
>> representation, and IEEE semantics on operations when/if they involve
>> Inf or NaN.
> 
> I *think* that, for the numbers both formats can represent, F-float and
> G-float are identical to IEEE single and double.

Normal numbers, yes, except that all zeroes in the exponent means 
different things on VAX and IEEE.

>>> [...]
> 
>> But I remember building Python many years ago.  It worked just fine,
>> but the test suite to verify that it worked correctly always failed.
> 
> docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html says that python
> numbers.Real "represent machine-level double precision floating-point
> numbers", going on to say "You are at the mercy of the underlying
> [hardware/software implementation] for the accepted range and handling
> of overflow".  If the test suite still fails on VAXen, I would say it's
> broken to the point that filing a bug report against the test suite is
> appropriate.

I might remember wrong and that it was Perl, but I was pretty sure it 
was the test suite for Python.
That test suite (of course) assumed IEEE FP.

   Johnny