> On Thu, 20 May 1999, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> 
> > Fast floating point would be good, but only if it is IEEE compliant.  
> > Anything else is going to cause problems for a lot of others.  Don't 
> > forget that understanding of the IEEE data format is embedded deeply 
> > within many programs and libraries (starting with, but not limited to 
> > libc, gcc, gas, gdb ...)
> 
> Oooohhhh, I don't know about that.  The NetBSD/vax port uses native VAX
> floating point operations, and they're not IEEE compliant.  They're VAX
> D_float format.   There's the odd problem here and there, but it doesn't
> wreak great havoc.

But it's always been that way on the Vax (IIRC Vax FP predates IEEE).  On 
the ARM, it has always been IEEE, so to change would break compatibility.

Richard.