In message <mailman.702.1243237468.8015.python-l...@python.org>, Dave Angel wrote:
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > >> Anybody remember a certain Prof William Kahan from Berkeley ... >> > I remember the professor. He was responsible for large parts of the > Intel 8087 specification, which later got mostly codified as IEEE 754. The 8087 was poorly designed. It was stack-based, which caused all kinds of performance problems that never really went away, though I think Intel tried to patch over them with various SSE extensions. I believe AMD64 does have proper floating-point registers, at last. Apple's implementation of IEEE 754 was so rigorous that, when Motorola introduced the 68881, which implemented a few of the "shortcuts" that Kahan reviled in his foreword, Apple added a patch to its SANE library to restore correct results, with the usual controversy over whether the performance loss was worth it. If you didn't think it was, you could always use the 68881 instructions directly. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
