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From: pschmidt@athena.mit.edu (Peter H. Schmidt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.3b1
Subject: Re: Paranoia freaks under SVS Fortran!
Summary: Yep, it's wicked broken
Keywords: SERIOUS DEFECTS
Message-ID: <1991Mar2.014748.23501@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 2 Mar 91 01:47:48 GMT
References: <1991Mar1.194517.10627@notvax.ccny.cuny.edu> <1991Mar1.203900.11034@notvax.ccny.cuny.edu>
Sender: Peter H. Schmidt
Followup-To: comp.sys.3b1
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Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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In article <1991Mar1.203900.11034@notvax.ccny.cuny.edu> jeffrey@sci.ccny.cuny.edu (Jeffrey Bromberger) writes:
>> The arithmetic diagnosed has unacceptable Serious Defects.
>
I found this soon after I got my 3b1, since I tested Unix sysytems for a
living in a previous life.  But, there's good news and bad news. The bad
news is that there may not be much we can do about this.  Remember that
Paranoia hasn't been around on Unix machines for more than a couple years, and
vendor awareness of the importance of conforming to the IEEE floating point
spec (for Unix machines) only really struck with the advent of workstations.
The graphics involve mucho floating point, and the flaw in your roundoff
routines becomes real apparent when your X-windows "ico" starts to look more
like a crumpled paper towel (I actually had to use this as a demo to convince
one of our more recalcitrant developers ;-).  When the 3b1 was being worked
on, no one probably placed much importance on getting every nit-picking detail
of the float spec right...

The good news is that the flaws mentioned won't affect most of the work a 3b1
is best suited for.  After all, it isn't exactly a FLOPS power house.
It's too bad though.  Can anyone out there with experience in this area
provide any hope?

Regards -- Peter
--
Peter H. Schmidt	| ...mit-eddie!winter!pschmidt
3 Colonial Village, #10	| winter!pschmidt@mit-eddie.mit.edu
Arlington, MA  02174	| -- Speaking for myself.