Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 12:24:32 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: imp@village.org (Warner Losh) Cc: pst@shockwave.com, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: tail dumps core Message-ID: <199510110254.MAA13116@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199510102056.OAA18756@rover.village.org> from "Warner Losh" at Oct 10, 95 02:56:53 pm
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Warner Losh stands accused of saying: > : How could this possibly be allowed by the C standard? I'm utterly > : confused. > > I think that on one's complement machines you can have a zero that is > "+0" and one that is "-0", one of which may or may not be the > "standard" zero on that platform. +0 is typically all zeros on this > machine but -0 typically has the sign bit set, and all the rest of the > bits clear. However, on a machine like this one would expect the zero > to either be normalized, or the sign bit to be masked out. You may also be on a platform that uses offset binary, or that packs hardware type information into spare bits. The C standard strives for portability. I don't expect that any of the above is likely to become popular in the near future, so it's not really such an issue. > Warner -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] My car has "demand start" -Terry Lambert UNIX: live FreeBSD or die! [[
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