Reporting bugs: there is nothing to gain in frustrating reporters

[Mattias Karlsson]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2005-06-16 17:54:03 -0400, Robert Dewar wrote:
>> As you well know, not everyone agrees this is a bug, and this does
>> not have to do with performance. Saying over and over again that you
>> think it is a bug does not make it so.
>
> I haven't seen any correct argument why it could not be a bug.
> Saying that the x86 processor is buggy is just completely silly.
> Only some gcc developers think so.
>

Don't know about you, but I consider any processor that is unable to store 
a register to memory and then read back the same value to be buggy.

Sure, you can change rounding precision but according to my 2003 version 
of "IA-32 Intel(r) Architecture Software Developer's Manual - Volume 
1: Basic Architecture"
  a) That takes at least 4 instructions.
  b) Only affects some instructions, and then only the result.
  c) Only affects the significand and not the exponent.

Disclaimer: I haven't done any testing to verify that this is actually the 
case since I have no access to x86 hardware.