floating-point formats

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
> Date: 18 Jul 2002 12:15:29 -0700
> 
> In addition, maintaining code to be aware of other FP formats (or byte
> sizes) is adding additional work on the maintainer.  I have no interest
> in having to do even more for effectively no gain.

I agree with Ulrich here.  It is a matter of priorities, and lots of
other things should have higher priority than supporting ancient
floating-point formats.  Stephen Moshier's recent 128-bit IEEE
floating-point contributions, for example, were rightly of much higher
priority.

If there would be a simple way to support alternate floating point
formats, a way which wouldn't impinge much on the existing code and
which could be maintained separately by loosely-coupled (and
presumably diligient) volunteer group, then I suspect Ulrich would be
all ears.  But I don't sense that happening here.