Reporting bugs: there is nothing to gain in frustrating reporters

[Toon Moene]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> I wrote:

>> Unfortunately, somewhere in the design process of the 8087 things went 
>> wrong and the chip only handles 8 80-bit registers, not providing an 
>> interrupt (or any other support) to an OS to fake the "virtual" 80-bit 
>> registers.

> This is nonsense. It is perfectly possible to extend the stack accurately
> in memory. That is easily true on the 387, but was also true on the 8087
> with just a little bit of fiddling (I know that some people thought this
> was not possible, but they just did not look hard enough, the Alsys Ada
> compiler for instance used a stack model for fpt, and dynamically extended
> this stack in memory, so this is certainly possible).

Well, I haven't studied this to such a great detail because I (according 
to Kahan) belong to the group of people who "don't care about floating 
point accuracy because their code is so robust they can even run on 
Cray's", but doesn't this mean that we can solve it in the compiler by 
having its run time library provide this functionality ?

Given that most modern compilations on x86 hardware would use SSE, we 
could at least comfort the users who do want to use the extra bits of 
80-bit floating point land ...

It'll be the final nail in the coffing of PR/323 ...

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
A maintainer of GNU Fortran 95: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/
Looking for a job: Work from home or at a customer site; HPC, (GNU) 
Fortran & C