🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan6.005916.800@odin.corp.sgi.com>, mash@mash.wpd.sgi.com (John R. Mashey) writes:
|>In article <3236@contex.contex.com>, frank@marvin.contex.com (Frank Perdicaro) writes:
|>|> In article <1992Dec20.004150.14551@sol.ctr.columbia.edu> penev@venezia.rockefeller.edu writes:
|>|> >Mark Bartelt (sysmark@helios.physics.utoronto.ca) wrote:
|>|> >: Nearly a year ago I groused a bit about the fact that neither C nor
|>|> >: fortran (under IRIX 4.0.x) support 128-bit floats, and that (worse!)
|> 
|> [discussion on tradeoffs to pay to have 128-bit FP on the processor]

I would also answer 'Faster 64-bit' rather than '128-bit'.
But if i remember correctly the original post (there is a bit of it above), the
question was "can we have 128-bit float support in your compilers" ?

I believe that having software support would still be very useful for
development of numerical algorithms.  sometimes you need a 'reference run'
to check the stability of differential equation solvers or whatever.
you may not care if this reference run is slow.  

so i would say, thanks hardware guys, don't worry about that,
and perhaps it's now the time for compiler folks to jump on this thread :-)

--
Furio Ercolessi
Materials Research Laboratory           |   Intl School for Advanced Studies
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   |   Trieste, Italy
furio@uiuc.edu                          |   furio@sissa.it