Floats in the protocol

[Marc Balmer]

> On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 08:01 -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 13:41 +0100, Simon Thum wrote:
> > 
> > > On XDS 08, Keith suggested simply putting them on the wire. That is,
> > > require IEEE756 32 bit and account for endianness.
> > 
> > GLX already uses both 32 and 64 bit IEEE floats on the wire, so I don't
> > see any reason to use something different here.
> > 
> > I'd like to add floats to the render protocol as well, mostly for
> > matrices where fixed point values cause significant errors.
> > 
> 
> The reason for avoiding floats in the core protocol was that in that
> era, we had a number of platforms that were not IEEE compliant (e.g.
> older VAXen, Cray).  That is no longer an issue.

Why is this no longer an issue?

The BSD Unixes still support the Vax and are actually used.  Doesn't
IEEE in the protocol mean mean dropping support for such architectures?

> Differing behavior in NAN and soft underflow situations seems to be
> something we have to live with anyway; and is certainly much less evil
> than the previous disaster.  Converting to a string format then brings
> up a whole other set of conversion disaster possibilities.
> 
> KISS: let's go with IEEE....
>                               - Jim
> 
> -- 
> Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
> One Laptop Per Child
> 
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-- 
Marc Balmer, Micro Systems, Wiesendamm 2a, Postfach, CH-4019 Basel, Switzerland
http://www.msys.ch/     http://www.vnode.ch/   "In God we trust, in C we code."