From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!cbosgd!mark Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: please fix floating point in the c compilers! Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2605 Posted: Wed Sep 8 12:15:46 1982 Received: Thu Sep 9 05:37:56 1982 References: sri-unix.3116 I quote from page 184 of the C book (section 6.2 of the C reference manual): "All floating arithmetic in C is carried out in double-precision; whenever a float appears in an experssion it is lengthened to double by zero-padding its fraction." Thus, any "fix" to the C compilers that cause single precision arithmetic to be carried out using single precision instructions would be a violation of the language, unless it could be shown that the results would be identical. I will not attempt to defend this, since I rarely use floating point I don't care one way or the other. But this property has been with the language since day one and is unlikely to change in the near future. Note that a similar thing happens with char/short/int - everything is widened to int before anything is done. Nobody seems to mind this, although if everything were widened to long on an 11 I suspect people would.