Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 11:12:24 -0800 From: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: historical stuff in math(3) Message-ID: <20040123191224.GA22288@VARK.homeunix.com> In-Reply-To: <14141.1074670873@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <14141.1074670873@critter.freebsd.dk>
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On Wed, Jan 21, 2004, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>
> Isn't all the vax-D format related stuff math(3) getting pretty old ?
Yes, and it is largely irrelevant to the present libm implementation.
Regardless of the Alpha architecture's support for it, a good deal of
work stands in the way of us supporting anything that doesn't look
like IEEE 754 floating point.[1]
On the other hand, the VAX section ties in with the exposition on IEEE
754 floating point. It would do little good to just remove it without
updating, expanding, and otherwise improving the rest of the document.
I looked at revamping math.3 a while ago but forgot about it. I'll
put it on my TODO list in any case, but anyone else is welcome to work
on it as well.
[1] I think the next big thing in floating point is going to be
efficient hardware support for interval arithmetic, and we
should be able to support that without too much ado as long
as the ends of the intervals are represented in 754 format.
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