On 24.06.2020 19:53, William F Pokorny wrote:
> (4) - And, yep. I don't like the DBL, SNGL in our source code since 
> v1.0. Or the PRECISE_FLOAT Christoph asked me to add to a pull request 
> years back which then never got adopted. PRECISE_FLOAT now needs to be 
> yanked at some point from povr and I'd like to drop DBL and SNGL too. 
> Today you can find the bare 'foat/double' declarations in the source 
> code depending on who wrote what. This makes it unlikely we can really 
> ever change DBL to be anything but double, for example. Certainly not 
> without a lot of type conversions even if, by some chance, everything 
> works correctly.

Except, that is not why they are there: DBL is in the source code 
because there was a time when you could not depend on "double" actually 
doing what you wanted it to do. A time when certain CPUs had 80 bit 
floating point numbers, and other odd things with software emulated 
floating-point. In this world it was essentially that the floating-point 
representation could be changed. These days are long over, but the code 
just happens to be so old that it still has these leftovers.

Thorsten

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