From: utzoo!decvax!ittvax!sii!wje
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: C Language Specification
Article-I.D.: sii.154
Posted: Thu Sep  9 09:08:32 1982
Received: Fri Sep 10 05:57:16 1982
References: mhb5c.1009

c
For many machines (those with decent hardware floating point) it doesn't
really slow things down too much to do all fp math in double. However, on
the current generation of 16 bit micros such as z8000 and 68000 systems,
you can't get fp hardware that runs fast enough to bother with. For these
machines, the double fp really slows things down a lot. Onyx systems
provided a switch -F for their C compiler that kept operations on single
precision flts in single precision. Note that this is generally invisible
to the program and does not affect portability, except to make programs
slow down on some machines.

I'm not saying that this is a particularly good idea, but it certianly
makes some applications more practical.

Incidentially, when Onyxes first came out, they had an AMD 9502 fpp chip.
A few benchmarks showed that fp operations could be done faster in
software! Result: no fpp chip anymore.

	Bill Ezell
	Software Innovations, Inc.
	decvax!sii!wje