Re: The arithmetic support of SCmode and DCmode.

[Joe Buck <jbuck at Synopsys dot COM>]

Craig Burley writes:

> It might just be that there aren't many hardcore users of complex
> arithmetic in C/C++ -- after all, it hasn't been working on many
> machines for awhile, as they don't have the equivalent of g77's
> -femulate-complex.

For C++, we aren't using the builtin complex support, at least at this
time; rather a class is used, which looks to the back end like a struct.
I've just checked libstdc++/std/complext.{h,cc} to verify that this is
still the case.

Will libstdc++ v3 attempt to exploit the builtin complex?

> (And, I've been told, GNAT doesn't offer -fno-emulate-complex -- i.e.
> it doesn't use the back end's complex facilities at all.  Dunno what
> it does for complex multiply/divide, though.)

The conclusion appears to be that the builtin complex support has received
very little use; Ada and C++ avoid it and Fortran works around its
limitations.