Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!uwm.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Killer Micro II Keywords: floating point Message-ID: <2493@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Date: 6 Sep 90 13:23:25 GMT References: <527@llnl.LLNL.GOV> <603@array.UUCP> <2482@l.cc.purdue.edu> <2497@l.cc.purdue.edu> <3755@osc.COM> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY Lines: 18 In article <3755@osc.COM> jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane) writes: | Our current programming languages have a strong influence. C has `float' and | `double' types, and most machines have single-precision and double-precision | floating point numbers. Coincidence? I think not. I miss this. Single and double precision came around before C by about a decade. Yes they went into C when it was designed. If you are implying that C was the reason manufacturers have double in hardware, the timeline runs the wrong way. And the last time I checked, Cray C didn't do hardware double for the double type, float and double were identical. As were short, long, and int. There is no ANSI max size, just min size, so this is a conforming implementation on that point. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.