Re: IEEE floating point initialization

[Robert T. Short]

It is certainly a friendly thing to to, but philosophically speaking, if 
it can't work, why carry the code around?  Just more stuff to have to 
manage.  Maybe even just put a "README.xxmachinexx" that says "octave 
can't work on this machine".  At that, the default seems to say it all 
anyway.


John W. Eaton wrote:
> Are there any objections to installing the following change?
>
> diff --git a/liboctave/lo-ieee.cc b/liboctave/lo-ieee.cc
> --- a/liboctave/lo-ieee.cc
> +++ b/liboctave/lo-ieee.cc
> @@ -155,15 +155,22 @@
>        break;
>  
>      case oct_mach_info::flt_fmt_cray:
> +      (*current_liboctave_warning_handler)
> +       ("lo_ieee_init: CRAY without IEEE floating point math: expect some 
> problems...");
> +      break;
> +
>      case oct_mach_info::flt_fmt_vax_d:
>      case oct_mach_info::flt_fmt_vax_g:
> +      (*current_liboctave_warning_handler)
> +       ("lo_ieee_init: VAX without IEEE floating point math: expect some 
> problems...");
>        break;
>  
>      default:
>        // If the format is unknown, then you will probably not have a
> -      // useful system, but we will just issue a warning and go on...
> -      (*current_liboctave_warning_handler)
> -       ("lo_ieee_init: unrecognized floating point format!");
> +      // useful system, so it is probably not worth continuing.
> +      (*current_liboctave_error_handler)
> +       ("lo_ieee_init: unrecognized floating point format!  Maybe DLAMCH is 
> miscompiled, or you are using some strange system without IEEE floating point 
> math?");
> +      abort ();
>      }
>  }
>  
> Since Octave won't really work properly on systems that don't have
> IEEE floating point arithmetic, maybe we should just fail even on the
> known systems?  I mean, I don't think anyone is using Octave on a VAX
> without IEEE math.  Or on any old CRAY hardware, though  I was
> semi-successful in getting Octave to run on one once.
>
> jwe
>
>
>