awk and stdio-common/tst-printf-format-as-double* trouble (mpfr support needed)

[Florian Weimer]

* > Hi.
>
> I've replied all, if anyone isn't interested then Maciej and I
> can continue privately; let me know.
>
> "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Arnold,
>>
>> > The longer story:
>> > 
>> > - Adding MPFR was a mistake. This became clear only in retrospect.
>> >   But it's been there for so long I'm very hesitant to remove it.
>>
>> As a matter of interest would your please share the technical rationale 
>> behind your conclusion?  The social factor, however regrettable, must only 
>> have been secondary if any at all.
>
> At the time, I thought I was getting decimal (exact) arithmetic. I didn't
> understand that it was still floating point, which, even though the
> precision could be extended, still isn't exact.

Sorry, do you mean decimal floating point support, as in Java's
BigDecimal?  I can see how this is very useful for some applications.

If I read the documentation correctly, MPFR only provides binary
floating point support.

Thanks,
Florian