Re: Moving VAX into 21 century :-)

[Paul Koning <paulkoning%comcast.net@localhost>]

> On Aug 28, 2019, at 8:20 AM, Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 08:08:49PM -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
>> 
>> The cleaner answer would be to do what Python does in a large number
>> of other places, which is to make some of the methods be available
>> or not depending on the environment.  Currently the math.xyz methods
>> that related to INF and NaN are not documented that way, but it seems
>> plausible enough that they could be.  And if so, the test suite would
>> simply deal with that as it deals with any other platform dependency.
> 
> It's hard to see it this way when there seems to be no other running
> system in the world I could build Python on that doesn't support IEEE
> math with INFs and NaNs.  I suppose it's (just barely) concievable
> someone still has a 1990s S/390 out there running an AIX VM with hex
> floating point only, but who believes Python would be buildable in that
> environment?

There is a surprising number of newer architectures that don't do IEEE.  See https://gcc.gnu.org/backends.html, the column marked "I".  And then there is SPU, which has IEEE float format but no NaN or Inf.  These don't seem to be NetBSD platforms, admittedly.  But it doesn't appear to be true that "all modern CPUs do IEEE".

	paul