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Re: floating point war casualty list
At 12:22 AM -0700 5/29/02, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 06:41:01PM -0400, Alan Lehotsky wrote:
>>
>> If I recall correctly, there are TWO (or more) PDP-11 floating point
>> formats. I think it had something to do with word-order for the
>> double-precision FP, but since it's been close to 25 years since I
>> last did anything with the PDP-11 my memory is somewhat fuzzy.
>
>As far as I know, there's F (single precision), D and G (two versions
>of double), and H (extended).
On the VAX, yes. But the PDP-11 had some architectural weirdity in
maybe the PDP-11/40's FP. And it was corrected in the 11/45, which
was the basic ILA emulated in the VAX's PDP-11 emulator.
>
>I had been under the impression that real.c implemented F and G
>formats, but from what people have been saying, real.c's VAX double is
>D format (which may be wrong - G format is/was more popular), and its
>VAX single is actually IEEE format, which is definitely wrong.
G & H formats were implemented as "specials" for Harvard's Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory. They wouldn't buy a machine unless DEC had
a FP with sufficient exponent to count all the atoms
estimated in the known
(circa 1976) universe. They also felt that the magnitude
representation of
G and D was insufficiently accurate for the calculations they
wanted to form.
[This is a second hand account from the G&H HW developers. I
implemented
G & H support in the Bliss compiler as builtin functions at the time]
>Be nice if we had all four and could switch between D and G at
>runtime, but this is nontrivial to implement.
There is NO reason why all 4 cannot co-exist - there are
individual instructions
for each form addf, addd, addg, addh, not "modes". Of
course, since in most
languages you can't disambiguate "double" as being
specifically G or D, it's
impractical. I would bet that most languages implemented a
specific type-name
as an extension.
Al Lehotsky
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