wrv (10/11/82)
The company I used to work for did 8080 development on RT-11 systems using Whitesmiths compilers. We found two major problems: 1. Whitesmiths compiles floating point constants into the .data section, while they compile int and long constants into the .text section. Since we were writing code for an EPROM/RAM environment, everytime we re-compiled a module we had to edit the assembler code to get the float and double constants out of RAM!!! We also had to patch one of their object module libraries because it had float constants which were being compiled into RAM. 2. Float/double functions are full of bugs! Often a statement like double * exp(double) will cause the function exp() (returns a double) to actually return the reciprocal of the return value. The code I left behind still has many bugs because of the bug-filled way in which they handle floating point code on the 8080. Once I benchmarked Whitesmiths software floating point library (no FPU) vs. the DEC RT-11 FORTRAN software floating point library and found the DEC stuff to be 1000% faster! We were shocked! Our solution was to provide dummy C library modules to diddle with the arguments passed in C and then call the FORTRAN floating point routines. So the moral of the story is: If you are going to do floating point stuff, DON'T USE WHITESMITHS. -Bill Vogel Bell Labs, Indian Hill .....ihnss!ihldt!wrv