On Sat 29 Nov 2003 at 10:53:11 -0500, Paul Mather wrote:
> I do have a vague recollection (that may be entirely wrong:) that
> "-mieee" appeared as default option on alpha builds after the fix went
> in, so if you are seeing "-mieee" when, say, building packages, then
> your version of NetBSD probably includes the fixed IEEE handling.

That could be the case, yes. I am re-building perl now to see what
options are used. -mieee is indeed one of them:

/usr/bin/cc -c -DPERL_CORE -fno-strict-aliasing
-I/home/tmp/lang/perl5/work.alpha/.buildlink/include -O2 -mieee
-I/home/tmp/lang/perl5/work.alpha/.buildlink/include -DPIC -fPIC toke.c

If that was the case with the Perl I previously had, I cannot easily
tell. I'm not sure if I recompiled it since I upgraded NetBSD to 1.6,
for instance.

Anyway, exp(- 736.285624221884) now returns 1.7188543818817e-320 (the
original test case), but unsurprisingly it returns 0 if I call it with an
even more negative argument. So for those configurations where exp(-
736.285624221884) gives 0, I would call that perhaps not as accurate as
possible but (in this context) certainly not a disaster. It is always
much better than crashing.

> Paul.
-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl        -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.