Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 03:02 PM 8/9/2001 -0700, Brad Hughes wrote:
[...]
> >I don't agree with defaulting to a rarely used floating poijnt format
> >to accommodate a rarely used module. Shouldn't we revert to VAX floats
> >by default, code around the tests for VMS, and await your fixes for the
> >Math:: modules? ;-)
>
> It's not just the math modules, unfortunately. Any operation on ints/floats
> that over or underflows the float max/min will cause perl to die. The only
> way around that is to kick in denorm results, and that means IEEE floats.
Maybe it's just me, then, but I *want* my programs to blow up if there's
overflow or underflow. It means something's wrong. Hasn't his always been
the case, and has only just become an issue due to the bigint test?
Brad
(And yes, I know I'll probably have to convert a couple of thousand data
files from VAX to IEEE floating point when the Great Port To IPF happens,
but I'd hoped to wait a few years before doing so.)
