Gentleman, leave this discussion to 2008...

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Warp wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
>> DO NOT ASK ME! They are going to do it, period! Is it really that difficult 
>> to understand? What the heck do you argue with me about the rationale behind 
>> *their* decisions?
> 
>   What decisions? Do you have any concrete reference eg. to some online
> linux community resource where they are saying that support for programs
> using the FPU will be dropped? Because I would certainly like to know how
> it makes any sense.

I believe I have provided more than enough references. You can Google for 
more information just as easily as I can.

	Thorsten

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> I believe I have provided more than enough references. You can Google for 
> more information just as easily as I can.

  So basically you are saying that, among others, linux is going to drop
support for programs using FPU opcodes, and you don't have any concrete
proof of that to show me.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Thu, 01 Jan 2009 02:46:55 +0100, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   At least in the past Intel processors had the strange rule that you  
> cannot
> use the FPU and the SSE unit at the same time. I don't know if they have
> fixed that limitation later.

I think that was FPU and MMX, the reason being that they used the same  
registers.


-- 
FE

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Warp wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
>> I believe I have provided more than enough references. You can Google for 
>> more information just as easily as I can.
> 
>   So basically you are saying that, among others, linux is going to drop
> support for programs using FPU opcodes, and you don't have any concrete
> proof of that to show me.

No, that is not what I am saying.

	Thorsten

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Warp wrote:
>   Windows, MacOS X and Linux all fully support programs which use the FPU.
> If they wouldn't, at least 99% of programs would stop working.

FWIW, I think you overestimate how many programs use floating point. :-)
I think the vast majority of programs people use other than perhaps games 
and other graphics type programs don't use any FP at all. Why would 
Thunderbird (for example) use FP?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Why would Thunderbird (for example) use FP?

  To parse CSS, where many values can be represented in decimal? Also
Thunderbird most probably supports JavaScript, which in turn should
support FP...

  (Sure, it could go the hard way and use fixed-point arithmetic, but
I think it would be more logical if it used FP.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > Why would Thunderbird (for example) use FP?

>   To parse CSS, where many values can be represented in decimal? Also
> Thunderbird most probably supports JavaScript, which in turn should
> support FP...

  Btw, out of curiosity, I downloaded the Thunderbird source code and
searched for usage of floating point. There are quite a lot of 'float'
and 'double' types used there, as well as many calls to the math.h library.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   To parse CSS, where many values can be represented in decimal? 

Thunderbird is email, but yes, granted, a lot of systems now have 
interpreters for arbitrary code built in. And a lot of systems rely on other 
systems (like the windowing system or HTML display modules) that might rely 
on FP, so I guess you could say those would break if FP stopped working.

> Thunderbird most probably supports JavaScript, which in turn should
> support FP...

I also meant that I wondered how many javascript programs actually use FP 
also. I've written programs for dozens of years, and I almost never use FP. 
Most "business"-type programs don't use FP for anything.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Warp wrote:
>   Btw, out of curiosity, I downloaded the Thunderbird source code and
> searched for usage of floating point. There are quite a lot of 'float'
> and 'double' types used there, as well as many calls to the math.h library.

Funky. I'll have to take a look to see what they're doing. Back when 
efficiency was more a concern, compilers would go out of their way to avoid 
loading FP code (like for printf()) if they didn't need to. Maybe it's 
faster to draw lines with FP nowadays than to use Bresenham or something.

Now you have me curious. I'll have to pull down sendmail and apache and 
subversion and etc to check. :-)  I suspect most of the FP has something to 
do with the UI, but I might be wrong there.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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