Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!lll-winken!abhg!misko
From: misko@abhg.UUCP (William Miskovetz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: What is "__fltused" symbol?
Summary: Huh?  But, AT&T doesn't have __fltused...
Message-ID: <138@abhg.UUCP>
Date: 23 Feb 90 23:07:56 GMT
References: <204@ncrday.Dayton.NCR.COM> <39129@ism780c.isc.com>
Organization: W. Miskovetz - Consulting, Danville, CA
Lines: 47

In article <39129@ism780c.isc.com>, dougl@madison.ism.isc.com (Douglas J Leavitt) writes:

A whole bunch of stuff deleted...

> 
> At ISC, somewhere between our 5.3.0 release 1.0.0 and our last 5.3.0
> release 1.0.6 while fixing an obscure C compiler bug we realized that
> the 2 or 3 statements still existed and yanked them.
> 
> When 5.3.2 came out we realized that AT&T had never yanked the lines,
> however we have never had sufficient reason to go back into the C compiler
> to do any bug fixes since somewhere in the 1.0.* days, so we have never
> yanked the lines again.
> 
> I expect that most likely we won't, as making unnecessary gratuitious
> C compiler changes is not sufficient reason to warrant the amount of
> regression testing we would have to do because of this.
> 
> So, in summary, it doesn't really matter because it's never used and
> should be pulled out, and maybe someday AT&T will do so if they so
> incline, and I doubt that they'll ever get down that far on the
> bug/enhancement list to make it matter.
> 
> 
> 		Douglas J Leavitt

I'm a little confused by this.  I have an old (release 3.1) AT&T
compiler, and a new (V4.1.5) ISC compiler.  Doing a:
    nm libc.a | grep fltused
I get a number of entries in the ISC libc.a library.  But, doing the
same command on the AT&T libc.a, I get no entries for fltused.  This
seems to indicate that AT&T did remove the fltused code, but ISC didn't.

This makes it impossible to substitute the AT&T libc.a for the ISC libc.a
since when linking you get an unresolved for __fltused.

The ISC libraries have a bug in rounding when printing (fprintf) 
floating point numbers.  I was hoping to try to substitute the AT&T
libraries, but they are incompatible.  Substituting them in just gets
me unresolved __fltused.

Do I have this backwards and AT&T removed the code but ISC didn't?

Bill Miskovetz
{uunet!lll-winken, apple!mathworks}!abhg!misko
misko@mathworks.com
abhg!misko@lll-winken.llnl.gov