Re: One more oddity with gcc and vax floats...

[Paul Koning <paulkoning%comcast.net@localhost>]

> On Jun 10, 2026, at 9:38 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire%neurotica.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On 6/10/26 09:31, John Klos wrote:
>>>>>  This is just one more problem with non-IEEE floating point. Since this
>>>>>  is a battle that cannot be won maybe I should put the dust of the
>>>>>  "Emulate IEEE floating point" stuff I once worked on.  Must read up on
>>>>>  the IEEE 754 standard first though.
>>>> 
>>>>  i wouldn't hate this. :-)
>>> 
>>> I'm not convinced. Starting to do all FP math in software will be costly, on a machine that is already suffering heavly with performance issues.
>> Why couldn't hardware floating point do much of the work?
> 
>  I was about to ask the same thing.  Let the hardware do the FP in VAX format, and the emulation would just be a thin translation layer.  There would be some edge cases like NaN etc, but other than that, it's not that hard to do.

It's not quite a thin translation layer because the ranges are different, and IEEE has rounding modes that DEC float doesn't.

	paul