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From: glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1
Subject: Re: Does Ada need elemental functions to make it suitable for
 scientific work?
Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:59:40 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2012-07-29T20:59:40+00:00
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In comp.lang.pl1 Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote:

(snip)
> ix86's have 80-bit floats (GNAT's Long_Long_Float); what other
> commonly-available extended hardware precisions are there?

IBM S/370 and successors (now z/Architecture), and VAX have a 128
bit floating point type. The hardware instructions might be
done by software emulation for VAX. For S/370, DXR (divide) was
done in software, but sometime in ESA/390 was added to the
architecture.

>> Which advantage gets lost when external numeric libraries are used.

> I believe that BLAS & possibly LAPACK can be built for extended
> precision. But (usually) aren't.

Many routines have to be modified for higher precision, such
as more coefficients for polynomial expansions. It can be done,
but often isn't.

-- glen