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Thoughts about a floating point exception fix



I've been thinking about issues with floating point exceptions on VAXen. Currently it's difficult to compile packages such as python which have tons of floating point tests because so many of them fail because of infinities or NaNs. awk is still problematic when used in pkgsrc because of FP exceptions.

What if we made sure all the soft-float stuff is in libm and compiled certain tools such as awk and selected pkgsrc packages to use software floating point? I think this would be a good way to fix some of these longstanding issues.

Of course there'd be complications such as linking hardware floating point libraries with software floating point programs, but even a statically linked awk would be a big help.

Thoughts?

John Klos


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