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Date:      Sat, 21 Feb 1998 15:21:38 +1100
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        jkh@time.cdrom.com, neil@causality.com
Cc:        bugs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Floating point errors
Message-ID:  <199802210421.PAA18491@godzilla.zeta.org.au>

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>> I've ben trying to execute some pattern recognition software that we are
>> trying to evaluate on different OS/system architectures for an acedemic
>> client. Although it runs fine on NetBSD, and other unix OSs, on FreeBSD
>> it dies with a floating point exception for some reason. Annoying :-)
>
>Yes.  Bruce, our FP guru, has long felt that it's more important to be
>technically correct and die rather than run incorrectly, and he fights
>back vigorously every time we talk about changing the default setting
>of the FPE mask. :-)

Wrong.  I feel that it is more useful to die rather than possibly
run incorrectly.  Programmers who actually understand FP exceptions
can easily change the default exception mask (I changed it 3 years
ago on my systems).  The technical correctness of this is debatable.
It prevents the math libraries from being ANSI conformant, but the math
libraries have more serious ANSI conformance bugs.  I don't plan to
change the exception handling until the other bugs are fixed.

Bruce

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