Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!uwvax!dogie!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!mcvax!unido!sbsvax!greim
From: greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: perl compilation problems on a fortune 32:16
Keywords: perl ecvt printf _doprnt bugs SIEMENS
Message-ID: <512@sbsvax.UUCP>
Date: 30 May 88 09:19:51 GMT
Organization: Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, West Germany
Lines: 43
Posted: Mon May 30 10:19:51 1988

In <1988May28.141939.11272@light.uucp> Bakul Shah writes:
>Michael Greim writes:
>>In article ... Bakul Shah (me) writes
>>concerning problems when compiling perl :
>>
>>>BTW, if ``printf("%.20g", 5.0);'' gives you 5.0000000000000000 instead
>>>of just 5, you may need to patch ecvt.o.  ...
>>
>>I installed perl (patchlevel 14) on our machines and had a similar problem
>>on a SIEMENS PC-MX2 running SINIX v2.0 (derived from Sys3 and/or GENIX).

>[a description of a work around deleted]

>I claim that the problem is with the runtime library in both cases.
Of course it is.

>While a quick fix gets the job done, I hope you would complain to
>Siemens about this bug.  In general it is not a good idea to mess with
>...
When it comes to complaints SIEMENS is just like /dev/null. 
>...
>other people's (useful) sources and besides, you can't go on fixing
>legit. C programs because *your* library can't handle them.
Of course I have to fix such programs. How do you think I could make
them work on my machine ?
What I wrote was *NOT* intended as a fix to perl. I just wanted to help
people who encountered such an error in their library routines.

>Meanwhile, I am interested in a public domain printf & friends.
In the implementations I saw, printf was just an interface to _doprnt,
which was written in assembler. Some time ago, I needed an extension to
printf, so I rewrote part of printf in C. It isn't very fast, but it works.
(No I can't give you the code :-)

		Michael

# include <disclaimer.std>
-- 

snail-mail : Michael Greim,
             Universitaet des Saarlandes, FB 10 - Informatik (Dept. of CS),
             Bau 36, Im Stadtwald 15, D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, West Germany
E-mail     : greim@sbsvax.UUCP