A request for information: What non IEEE 754 platforms exist that people care about running Python 2.6, Python 3.0 and higher on? By non IEEE 754 platform, I mean a platform where either the C double is not the usual 64-bit IEEE floating-point format, or where the C double is IEEE format but the platform deviates in major ways from the IEEE 754 specification. There are a few places (mostly in mathmodule.c, cmathmodule.c, floatobject.c, longobject.c) where it's not clear that the code behaves correctly on non-IEEE platforms, and I'm finding it difficult to determine how broken (or not) it is without having a clear idea of what possible unusual floating-point formats might come up. The major non-IEEE floating-point formats that I know of, on big iron, are the VAX, Cray and IBM formats; I believe anything else is too old to worry about. Is this true? The IBM format is particularly troublesome because it's base 16 instead of base 2 (so e.g. multiplying a float by 2 can lose bits), but it appears that recent IBM machines do both IBM format and IEEE format floating-point. I assume that the S-390 buildbots are using the IEEE side---is this true?
At the other end of the spectrum are embedded devices and cellphones. Here I have no idea what the situation is at all---any information would be valuable. Mark
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