Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsp!gillies
From: gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Knowing Machine Code
Message-ID: <104700042@uiucdcsp>
Date: 16 Jun 88 18:32:00 GMT
References: <13735@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Lines: 12
Nf-ID: #R:comp.vuw.ac.nz:13735:uiucdcsp:104700042:000:605
Nf-From: uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jun 16 13:32:00 1988


I think that when motorolla introduced the 68000, they also marketed
an inexpensive ROM chip that did floating point.  Was this floating
point the same as that of the 68881 chip?  If it was, I suppose Apple
could have put the chip in their macintoshes.

I have heard from an expert in floating point arithmetic (professor of
a ph.d. student who designed the package for Apple) that Apple numeric
packages are top-quality, and perhaps even better than the 68881.
There are big differences between different floating point
implementations, in round-off, precision, transcendental
accuracy/convergence/speed.