On Wednesday, April 12, 2006 @ 2:30 PM, John E. Perry wrote:
Sorry Greg, I forgot the SLE reply-to quirk.
No problem. I didn't realize the program used software to elevate the values for ordinates and mantissas beyond the machine's hardware limits. Very interesting. I'm obviously way behind the times on how math functionality is implemented in the modern PC era! Good info. This has always been true. Today, 128 bit long doubles are generally done in software. Additionally, some IEEE functionality is implemented in software. For instance, most floating point numbers are stored in normalized format, but there are numbers greater than 0.0 but less than the minimum normalized number that generally require software. These are called denormals, and
On Wednesday 12 April 2006 6:32 pm, Greg Wallace wrote:
those are one of the reasons that most compilers generate "fast floating
point" by default because strict IEEE compliance can be very slow.
--
Jerry Feldman