Floats in the protocol

[Jim Gettys]

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 19:40 +0100, Marc Balmer wrote:

> 
> 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?

This was very early VAXen; IEEE got added to the architecture in finite
time after its introduction (it was even a firmware retrofit on the
VAX-11/780 IIRC).

And we're talking about its use in more recent extensions: for example,
I doubt any VAX is going to want to run Render in software....

So I see no backward compatibility issue of merit here.
                           - Jim

-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child