Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ceres.physics.uiowa.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!udel!mmdf
From: HBO043%DJUKFA11.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Christoph van Wuellen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: 68K: New division subroutines for ack c compiler
Message-ID: <24821@nigel.udel.EDU>
Date: 17 Jul 90 08:47:25 GMT
Sender: mmdf@ee.udel.EDU
Lines: 20

Well, I took the sozobon floating point routines for two reasons:

before I had MINIX running, I had CP/M-68K, and the C compiler there uses
the same floating point format.
When I wrote that floating point stuff, the CP/M-68K mathlib was the only
floating point library I had.

I am hesitating including support for an 64-bit floating point format
as long I do not have a FPU. Since the code generator is strongly
register-oriented, the allocation of two 68000 registers for a floating
point number looks strange to me. If I can allocate a FPU register
instead, everything looks fine.

(Third, I use FORTRAN for my heavy floating point calculation. The existing
compilers are much better and I do not want to port some 100,000 lines of
code to C and learn that the vectorizer is not good for C.
I included the whole floating point stuff with TeX in mind. For this purpose,
the 32-bit format is ideal)

C.v.W.