Re: printf-frexp and the radix of floating point numbers

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> Paul Eggert wrote:
>> > Do they lack the C99 printf 'a' and 'A' conversion?)
>> 
>> It depends on the compiler and version.  For example, SAS/C 7.50
>> (April 2004) has 'a' and 'A', but SAS/C 7.00 (April 2001) does not.
>
> OK, a mainframe system with a 6 year old compiler - that's enough of a niche

Perhaps that wasn't a good example.  I chose SAS/C because I used to
know it better, but I now see that SAS is phasing it out and will stop
supporting it in a few years.

A more up-to-date mainframe C compiler would be Systems/C
<http://www.dignus.com/dcc/>.  Its most recent release is 1.85
(released 2006-09-01).  It supports some C99 features but not all, and
its documentation doesn't claim support for printf 'a' and 'A'.

Free-software guys on mainframes sometimes use GCC and PDPCLIB in a
combination called GCCMVS <http://www.softlib.org/GCCMVS/gccmvs.html>.
The PDPCLIB printf does not support 'a' and 'A'.  There aren't that
many people in this category, but I'd like to encourage them if it's
easy.

By the way, this is related to the notion that some free-software
folks advocate the use of older releases of IBM operating systems, as
they are in the public domain.  For example, see
<http://cbttape.org/~jmorrison/mvs38j/hercules.html>.  I think MVS
3.8j (circa 1980) is the most popular.

The mainframe world is pretty conservative....