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From: eichin@athena.mit.edu (Mark W. Eichin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl-Users Digest #524, "unsigned long ints/mips/floats + FIX"
Message-ID: <1990Dec19.002656.6510@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 19 Dec 90 00:26:56 GMT
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Reply-To: eichin@athena.mit.edu
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(Yeah, I'm still banging on this one, but at least it is "relevant to
the Perl language"...) It turns out that the NeXT machine also needs
the "#ifdef mips" case in util.c:castulong() to function correctly.
This appears to be a bug in "fixunsdfsi" but I don't know 68K
assembler well enough to tell... however, setting castneg=undef and
duplicating the #ifdef mips clause as #ifdef NeXT produces a perl
which passes all normal tests *and* handles DES properly. (This isn't
just an example of bizarre perl code: I reduced the bug to
	% perl -e 'printf "%lu\n",0x80000000;'
	2147483647
which is clearly and obviously wrong. I think the castneg try.c test
has to be made *much* stronger, or else it should simply check #ifdef
vax and only pass that case :-) At very least, it needs to check some
real values near 1<<31 for conversions. It should also really
*compute* some of them; one of the compilers I tried had *different
behavior* depending on whether the float to long conversion was
"constant folded" (ie done in the compiler) or done at runtime...)
				_Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
ps. Has anyone worked on more extensive Perl tests, comparable to SVVD
or maybe trip.tex? 
------ "Perl is APL on LSD" -- Seth Finkelstein -----