gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA (08/07/84)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA> (Note: I moved this response from Unix-Wizards to Info-C.) I think the ANSI C committee's decision not to REQUIRE that floats be handled in single-precision, but to encourage it when it is "natural" for the architecture, is quite proper. It is likely that market pressure will cause C compiler vendors to convert to single-precision float arithmetic when this yields faster, smaller code. Conversely, on architectures where double-precision is more natural (PDP-11?) there will be no additional penalty imposed.