Re: [RFA/mips] 128-bit long doubles for N32/N64

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis@jive.nl>]

   Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 21:39:06 -0700
   From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@gnat.com>

   > >Then let's let the fortran developpers fix it :-).
   > 
   > Or the Ada developers :-)

   Honestly, I think we're letting the best be the enemy of good.
   We have the choice between printing an approximation of a float,
   or printing nothing at all. Some users will be satisfied with
   the approximation. I will be. Why penalize these users?

I agree.

   I am ok with documenting this approximation in the GDB manual.
   If whoever wants to fix this later, then fine. But in the meantime,
   I think something is better than nothing.

Folks, Please realize that in practice, printing an approximation is
the best we can do anyway.  Unless we've got a native GDB and we've
properly set the host's floatformat in configure.host.  And in that
case the actual description shouldn't really matter; just that it
matches the description of the target floatformat.  So ...

   > >I vote for setting the format to ieee-double with a comment.
   > 
   > That would also be wrong.
   > 
   > Closer would be a new 128bit irix floatformat that knew how to unpack 
   > the first 64-bits.

   Indeed, maybe it would be cleaner to create a new irix-specific
   128bit floatformat that only uses the bits in the high part (basically,
   it would be a copy of the ieee_big with the size set to 128bits,
   or something like that, right?).

.. this seems a perfectly acceptable solution to me.  It'd avoid us
to really lie about the floating-point format, even though we're not
telling the complete truth.

Mark