Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability

[vsnyder@math.jpl.nasa.gov (Van Snyder)]

In article <dewar.848592914@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

|> Well the IEEE standard is nearly 20 years old now, so there are very few
|> such machines left, and they become of decreasing interest. The only
|> really notable exception is the Japanese super computers, which made the
|> horrible error of copying junk IBM hex floating-point.

There's an interesting story behind that.

When IBM was designing the 360, they hired Welwel Kahan as a consultant on
floating point arithmetic.  His recommendation was that the worst possible
thing they could do would be to use HEX radix floating point.  So they went
and did it anyway.

BTW, there is another notable exception.

Alphas can sort-of emulate VAX floating point, which isn't IEEE.  But when
they do, they convert VAX FP formats to IEEE, do the arithmetic, then convert
them back.  In the process, they lose one bit.  So it's the worst of both
worlds.

-- 
What fraction of Americans believe   |  Van Snyder
Wrestling is real and NASA is fake?  |  vsnyder@math.jpl.nasa.gov