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From: cuccia@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Nick Cuccia)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Floating Point routines
Message-ID: <19676@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 12-Jul-87 02:40:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.19676
Posted: Sun Jul 12 02:40:52 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Jul-87 00:38:29 EDT
References: <114@jc3b21.UUCP> <1205@botter.cs.vu.nl>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: cuccia@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Nick Cuccia)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 28

In article <1205@botter.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:

>1) No floats.  I agree, they would be nice, but I haven't personally used
>   a number > 32767 in years.  Is anyone working on floats?

>Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)

I'm currently working on versions of /usr/lib/libm.a (math functions)
and /usr/lib/libmp.a (multiple precision integer functions) to be distributed
with GNU, and will post sources when I'm finished.  My development
environments are several VAXen (750 running 4.2BSD, 8600 running 4.3BSD) and
a Sun 3/280 running SunOS v3.2, and will port the routines to MINIX when
final tuning is finished.

This brings me to another question: one of the niceties of the C compiler
for the Sun is the '-f' flag, through which the user can tell the compiler
what kind of acceleration hardware, if any, is installed in the workstation
or server.  For those working on the C compiler: how difficult would it be
to install such a flag, whose args would be the following:

	flag		meaning
	----		-------
	-fsingle	do not promote floats to doubles
	-f8087		compile code to be used with 8087 processor
	-fswitch	generate code that determines whether or not
			an accelerator chip is installed at runtime.

--Nick