On 04 Oct 2007, at 13:00, Daniël Mantione wrote:
I don't think it would be a good idea to map the extended type to
80 bit soft
float on platforms that don't support 80 bit fpu calculations in
hardware.
Many programs use "extended" by default without actually requiring
80 bit
precision, and mapping those all to soft float would needlessly
slow down such
programs.
I think a separate type would be more appropriate.
Hmmm... I prefer to keep correct code that writes say, an extended
type to
a file working,
It won't keep it working but rather break it, since currently writing
an extended to file on virtually all platforms writes a double to the
file.
over keeping code that falsely uses extended precision
fast, especially as I expect people to correct such code anyway to
take
advantage of SSE performance.
I don't expect that to happen in most situations.
In such case "extended" would also be a misleading name, since it
would
get "long double" semantics. Even worse, it would be a TP compatible
extended on i386 and some x86_64 platforms and long double on other
platforms.
It's probably better to directly introduce a longdouble type with
longdouble (128 bit) semantics on all platforms. I don't think that
emulating the almost nowhere supported 80 bit type does much good.
Jonas_______________________________________________
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