reeder@emx.utexas.edu (William P. Reeder) (11/23/88)
* usually called "plain old ugly FORTRAN" by UNIX types. I keep hearing researchers griping to me about NaN's and INF's in FORTRAN on Suns. They run a program for several hours only to find the output full of these pesky quantities. "Why doesn't it just blow up?", they ask. "Infinity and NaN are not acceptable values." They have a point. Mathematicians may want to preserve NaN's and INF's, but the average researcher considers them to be radioactive and wants them to nuke the program. I decided to RTFM (I'd never make as a user with this attitude :-) and found f77_ieee_environment(3F) and ieee_handler(3M). "Great!", I thought. I quickly checked these things out on our 4/280 and then dashed off a letter to several of our FORTRAN users. Then, in an uncontrollable fit of rational behavior I decided to try the same tests on my 3/50. First, I forgot to use the -f68881 option on f77 and discovered that ieee_handler didn't support plain old 3/50's. Why not, Sun? A 3/50 is probably as good as the average PC at FORTRAN and lots of folks use FORTRAN on PCs. Then I used -f68881 and got "*** Bus Error = signal 10 code 2" when I tried to execute the code. I know of at least one researcher who likes to develop and test codes on a 3/60 before running them on a 4/280 (or on our X/MP-24 for the really long runs). Has anyone else run into this problem? If you know more about it, please send me e-mail. I will probably be submitting a bug report about the Bus Error thing. William Reeder University of Texas at Austin reeder@emx.utexas.edu, ..!uunet.uu.net!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!reeder