[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

(snip)

> However, there still seem to be some debate about the real vs. double 
> floating point types as related to the PDP-11 architecture.

Fortran pretty much requires a single and double precision floating
point format. One or both can be done in software, but both should
be there. Hardware targeting Fortran usually supports both, so it
shouldn't be surprising that C also supports them.

Though from the beginning C tried to be a systems programming 
language, and not a scientific programming language, one might
argue that they weren't needed.

Fortran was a popular language on the PDP-11, though, so the
floating point processor would have been expected to support 
single and double precision.

-- glen