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Re: [RFA/mips] 128-bit long doubles for N32/N64
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 21:39:06 -0700
From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@gnat.com>
> >Then let's let the fortran developpers fix it :-).
>
> Or the Ada developers :-)
Honestly, I think we're letting the best be the enemy of good.
We have the choice between printing an approximation of a float,
or printing nothing at all. Some users will be satisfied with
the approximation. I will be. Why penalize these users?
I agree.
I am ok with documenting this approximation in the GDB manual.
If whoever wants to fix this later, then fine. But in the meantime,
I think something is better than nothing.
Folks, Please realize that in practice, printing an approximation is
the best we can do anyway. Unless we've got a native GDB and we've
properly set the host's floatformat in configure.host. And in that
case the actual description shouldn't really matter; just that it
matches the description of the target floatformat. So ...
> >I vote for setting the format to ieee-double with a comment.
>
> That would also be wrong.
>
> Closer would be a new 128bit irix floatformat that knew how to unpack
> the first 64-bits.
Indeed, maybe it would be cleaner to create a new irix-specific
128bit floatformat that only uses the bits in the high part (basically,
it would be a copy of the ieee_big with the size set to 128bits,
or something like that, right?).
.. this seems a perfectly acceptable solution to me. It'd avoid us
to really lie about the floating-point format, even though we're not
telling the complete truth.
Mark