edhall@randvax.UUCP (Ed Hall) (03/09/89)
V7 had it; heck, even V6 had (buggy) floating-point support (at least the rather hacked-up version I used did). Why doesn't MINIX support it? I'm tired of having to use DOS compilers for any C program with a decimal point in it. Why promote math illiteracy? :-) The compiler at least seems to half-way support floating-point, producing calls to various non-existant routines when FP is used but generating zero for any FP constant. Does anyone know if it produces correct code (other than for constants), given that the missing support routines are somehow supplied? Has anyone gotten floating-point working under MINIX? -Ed Hall edhall@rand.org uunet!sdcrdcf!randvax!edhall
Leisner.Henr@xerox.com (marty) (03/11/89)
Floating point is an interesting issue. Compiler vendors spend a lot of resources debugging and testing their floating pointing generation/support software. It's interesting to note the amount of software Minix has which doesn't need floating point. You also have operating system issues like hardware support (coprocessors) -- 8087/287/387, Weitek, etc, and context switching problems. I don't think ast promotes math illiteracy -- I think Minix promotes simplicity. Most (not all) application I've seen professionally which use floating point can easily be recoded to use integer math. After all, bits are bits ;-). If I had to give up something, floating point is something I could definitely live without. It's should be possible to cross-compile with a vendor supplied floating point emulation on Minix. marty ARPA: leisner.henr@xerox.com GV: leisner.henr NS: martin leisner:wbst139:xerox UUCP: hplabs!arisia!leisner
ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (03/13/89)
>Why doesn't MINIX support it [floating point]?
More lack of manpower than anything else. Maybe someday.
Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)