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

> On Jun 10, 2026, at 12:33=E2=80=AFPM, Johnny Billquist =
<[email protected]> wrote:
>=20
> On 6/10/26 18:27, Mouse wrote:...
>=20
>> VAX float also doesn't have subnormals.
>=20
> Also true, but I think we could possibly ignore that one. Just as I =
think the rounding differences can be ignored, except for test programs =
that explicitly check for those.

Can you?  I know there are people who care about rounding modes.  Even =
the crazy "round to even" mode, what sort of drugs were involved in =
inventing that one?

Then again, it may be people care because they think they should, even =
though in reality it doesn't matter.  If your code is sensitive to =
rounding it is skating far too close to the edge and either needs wider =
floats, or not use floats at all.  ("If you don't understand your =
problem well enough to scale it to integers, you don't understand it =
well enough" -- von Neumann)

I remember that CDC was very successful with the 6600 supercomputers =
even though their rounding is quite broken (I think they round at 1/3 =
LSB, at least Dijkstra said they do).

	paul=