Message-ID: <19980408144508.09240@freebie.lemis.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 14:45:08 +0930
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To: edgee@cyberpass.net
Cc: pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Subject: Re: Floating Point-How Important to Unix?
References: <199804080325.XAA26777@renoir.op.net>; <19980408133357.40721@freebie.lemis.com> <199804080427.AAA00145@renoir.op.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
In-Reply-To: <199804080427.AAA00145@renoir.op.net>; from Ed G. on Wed, Apr 08, 1998 at 12:27:40AM -0400
WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog
Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia
Phone: +61-8-8388-8286
Fax: +61-8-8388-8725
Mobile: +61-41-739-7062
Sender: owner-pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Precedence: bulk

On Wed,  8 April 1998 at  0:27:40 -0400, Ed G. wrote:
>> text with adb to see what purpose they serve.  Considering that
>> floating point was an option, I find it hard to believe that so many
>> programs, in particular things like tar, would use FP.
>
> My guess is that the floating point code is dragged in when certain
> library routines (e.g., printf and libc) are used, even if the
> floating point features of the routines are not used.
>
> Consider this:
>
> Two programs hello.c and nothing.c, identical except that hello.c
> contains a single printf("hello world\n") inside main.  nothing.c
> has nothing in its main loop.
>
> Program--Size--Number of FPOs Reported by my perl script
> ===========================================
> nothing.c, 312 bytes, 2
> hello.c, 4804 bytes, 115
>
> See what I mean?

I don't see that this proves anything.  You really need to look at
those words and see how they are used.

Greg