Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > What would the purpose be of not including ISA, EISA, VESA or at least AGP slots
> > on mainboards anymore?
>
>   You missed the point: What sense does it make to drop support for the FPU
> in the OS when the hardware has perfectly good FPU support?

And you missed *my* point: I just referred to hardware because it's where the
most obvious changes have been made.

The motto is phasing out old stuff. If Intel would just drop the FPU from future
designs, people would complain about *them* breaking software, and even louder
so. Everybody expects a few programs to not run under new versions of Windows -
but nobody expects any software (except very exotic ones) to crash just because
you upgraded to the newest, fastest CPU.

You have to change *somewhere* to phase out old stuff. And this *somewhere* is
the where changes *can* be made *now* without breaking *anything*: New software
being developed, and new versions of existing software being compiled. In 99% of
all cases it will just be a matter of recompiling with an up-to-date compiler
version.


> > If your software doesn't live & breathe from fast trigonometrics, fingers off
> > the x87 FPU.
>
>   You can't go and change millions of existing programs to not to use the FPU.

You didn't get *that* point either: It's currently not about those binaries out
there in the field. As of now, it's just about new binaries being *added* to
the field. The more keep going out there, the more there are to break when one
wants to actually get rid of the old stuff.

So the procedure here is deprecation, which is stopping the flow of new
"breakable" software out into the field. Once that is achieved, the procedure
will be to wait until so much of the old software has been put out of use that
not much of it will be left to be broken anyway. Most will have been replaced
by newer versions, or even whole new software.

We're not talking abount months here. We're talking about years. Lots of.

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