Floats in the protocol

[Matt Thomas]

On Jan 6, 2009, at 10:49 AM, Jim Gettys wrote:

> 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).

You recall incorrectly.  IEEEfp was never added to VAX.  Alpha could do
either VAXfp or IEEEfp which might be what you are recalling.

> 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....

I hope not.

> So I see no backward compatibility issue of merit here.

Same issue for Java on VAX (since Java specifies IEEEfp).