Re: Release Plans

[John W. Eaton]

On 04/23/2013 09:14 AM, Philip Nienhuis wrote:

> Yes you're right, I remember the FPU flags issue. But was that an Octave
> bug (not properly preserving & resetting those flags) or a Java bug?
> It's a bit hard to believe that other SW developers never hit this
> issue, as Java is so immensely widely used.

I wasn't aware that Octave is setting FPU flags to some non-default 
values except on BSD systems where it was apparently required to avoid 
trapping when generating Inf and NaN values.

So I think it would be unusual to have to save and restore FPU flags 
before and after calling some library routine.  Maybe the library 
routines should be taking care of that detail?

I suspect this usually goes unnoticed because people don't care.  As I 
recall, we only noticed because of small (on the order of the machine 
precision) changes in some test results.  If we hadn't had the previous 
values, I don't think that we would have noticed either.

jwe