Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 20:47:11 GMT
From: pete@dunnington.u-net.com (Pete Turnbull)
Message-Id: <9805102147.ZM8056@indy.dunnington.york.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: "Steven M. Schultz" <sms@moe.2bsd.com>
        "Re: Floating Point-The Results Are In!" (May 10,  9:49)
References: <199805101649.JAA00593@moe.2bsd.com>
Reply-To: pete@dunnington.u-net.com
To: pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Subject: Re: Floating Point-The Results Are In!
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On May 10,  9:49, Steven M. Schultz wrote:
> Subject: Re: Floating Point-The Results Are In!
>
> > From: Johnny Billquist <bqt@Update.UU.SE>
> > I wouldn't be *that* surprised by these results. For instance, I
believe
> > that longs are implemented with FP. And I wouldn't be surprised if a
few
> > FP ops were sneaked in to compute some stuff that aren't immediately
> > appearant.
>
> 	It is true that _some_ long arithmetic is done using FP.  The long
> 	divide is done that way (at least in 2BSD, I've not looked at V7
> 	yet) because it is much much less code to convert the operands to
> 	FP, do the divide, and then convert the result back (the
alternative
> 	is about two pages of code).

> 	The C compiler itself did NOT generate FP unless the operands were
> 	explicitly FP (float or double).  Most C code was 'int' or 'char *'
> 	and no FP code was needed or used for that.

That bears out what I disovered by accident yesterday -- looking at a 7th
Edition UK source distribution for 11/23's and other small machines.  The
READ_ME file lists the programs that have possible floating point problems,
or which might be too big using emulation.   I can't remember the details,
but the list had a few surprises.

Most of the C programs have very little FP, and that is mostly due to a
small number of library routines that include FP ops, but one or two
programs are exceptional.

For example, 'factor' has a lot of FP at the beginning, a chunk in the
middle, and a large subroutine near the end, which uses FP to compute
square roots using Newton's method.  factor is written in assembler, not C,
and has much more FP than other things I looked at, but several other
programs use a little.

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York