Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!uw-june!wendyt
From: wendyt@cs.washington.edu (Wendy Thrash)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.pyramid
Subject: Re: Any compatibility issues between Pyramid systems?
Message-ID: <11130@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 16 Mar 90 22:56:40 GMT
References: <6707@brspyr1.BRS.Com> <105575@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Reply-To: wendyt@june.cs.washington.edu (Wendy Thrash)
Organization: University of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 16

In article <105575@pyramid.pyramid.com> csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
>There are no *problems* that I've ever heard of, but there are a few consider-
>ations.

More considerations: 1) The floating-pont format changed slightly from
the older machines to the newer ones.  This means that some numbers
(those with maximum exponent) that were perfectly ordinary numbers on
the oldest machines are now NaN or Inf on the newer ones.  If you do not
have mountains of floating-point data (with fairly wide range) this will
probably not be a problem, but it is a consideration.

2) The newer machines round to nearest by default, whereas the older ones
always truncated.  For details, do man math  (or was it man float . . .
well, something like that) on a reasonably  recent release of OSX.
This means that some programs will get slightly different results on
the newer hardware.