Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!context
From: context@june.cs.washington.edu (Ronald Blanford)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Floating point for Minix cc(1)
Message-ID: <6471@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 20 Nov 88 00:01:43 GMT
References: <595768844.26413@minster.york.ac.uk>
Reply-To: context@june.cs.washington.edu (Ronald Blanford)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 19

In article <595768844.26413@minster.york.ac.uk> john@minster.york.ac.uk writes:
>                                          ...all it would take is for the
>owners of the cc(1) code generator to alter it to produce 80X87 (IEEE
>standard) constants, and for someone to flesh out the C library routines
>to use 80X87 operations. 

I suspect it would require changes to the kernel as well, to save and
restore the state of the 80x87 on context switches.  Those who don't
use floating point might not want the overhead, so the kernel should
try as well to identify the offending programs.

Be that as it may, even software floating point would be nice.  When
people finally get around to doing graphics, they will find that
representations of screen coordinates and color values are most
naturally and portably expressed as floating point values in the
interval [0,1].  Porting existing graphics packages will be difficult
without it. 

-- Ron