Re: real.c implementation

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Robert Dewar writes:

 > Second, with regard to decimal constants, we don't want to generate constants
 > in decimal in any case, because assemblers cannot be trusted. So when we did
 > generate in decimal, we noticed two things, GCC did not always get denormals
 > right (there may have been other problems, but I can't remember), and in any
 > case assemblers did not do the conversions last bit accurate with the 
 > required rounding mode.

This is the part I don't understand.  On a machine with IEEE format
arithmetic all langauges benefit if floating-point literals are
generated precisely, even if the language specification does not
require it.

Andrew.