Re: Moving VAX into 21 century :-)

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2019 at 04:19:10PM +0200, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> That would be far too much inneccessary work.  I think making VAX FP act as
> IEEE is easy and lightweight.  Trying to fool zillions of packages are
> really time-consuming for no gain.

The places where I have seen arbitrary pkgsrc programs have issue with
VAX and floating point was 99% when they hard coded stupid float constant
meant to mean "way out" as something with a too huge exponent for VAX.

Replacing the constants with FLOAT_MAX or similar was easy.

The other place the different format causes issues live in our own
libm, where various tables need to be recomputed for VAX and the
original generator program is not available. I don't think your
suggested change would help here.

But of course (due to the broken compiler situation) I have not been building
lots of VAX pkgs (and my selection might have been different than yours).

Martin