From owner-freebsd-standards Fri Apr 12 11:16:55 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-standards@freebsd.org Received: from rover.village.org (rover.bsdimp.com [204.144.255.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 25B3137B400 for ; Fri, 12 Apr 2002 11:16:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from harmony.village.org (harmony.village.org [10.0.0.6]) by rover.village.org (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g3CIGpi15830; Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:16:51 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from imp@village.org) Received: from localhost (warner@rover2.village.org [10.0.0.1]) by harmony.village.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g3CIGoc52958; Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:16:50 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from imp@village.org) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:16:45 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <20020412.121645.03985114.imp@village.org> To: wollman@lcs.mit.edu Cc: tim@robbins.dropbear.id.au, freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: standards/36783 From: "M. Warner Losh" In-Reply-To: <200204121639.g3CGdOZ90234@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> References: <200204121240.g3CCe3a52899@freefall.freebsd.org> <200204121639.g3CGdOZ90234@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> X-Mailer: Mew version 2.1 on Emacs 21.1 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message: <200204121639.g3CGdOZ90234@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> : Because of the way the IA-32 FPU is configured by default, using : extended precision generally doesn't do any good, and I think in the : current compilers a double and a long double are both implemented as : FPU doubles. (This certainly was true at one time.) This is no longer true. Long doubles can and do give better precision than doubles, but at a high performance cost. printf can't print a long double more precisely than what double can represent, however, since printf casts it to a double first. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message