Problem with egcs and denormalized constants?

[David Edelsohn]

>>>>> Gary Thomas writes:

Gary> This turns out to be a bug in the GAS IEEE FP code.  It could potentially
Gary> happen on any platform, but it is seldom seen from C code.  This is because
Gary> most of the GCC/EGCS back-ends generate raw hex values for the FP constants.
Gary> The PowerPC back-end uses the ".float" directive instead.

	The PowerPC port goes to the trouble of emitting the actual bit
pattern for infinities, NaNs, and -0 (as opposed to +0).  Most other ports
emit the bits consistently.  I have no problem changing EGCS to be
consistent with the others.  I am not fully sure why the PowerPC port is
implemented to email FP constants as FP values; it may have been a
holdover before the port was converted to use the GCC built-in
REAL_ARITHMETIC support.  Are there any reasons that I should not switch
to the underlying bit patterns?

Thanks, David