[Info-vax] Roadmap

[John Reagan]

On Sunday, January 6, 2019 at 4:37:21 PM UTC-5, Dave Froble wrote:

> 
> Maybe the D_FLOAT was retained because many depended upon it?
> 

Perhaps, but that was trashed on Itanium where the default went from F to S.  If binary compatibility for BASIC was important, I would have expected single to say as F as well as double saying with D.

/REAL_SIZE evolved from /SINGLE and /DOUBLE which control what whether floating was single precision or double precision.

I'd love to change it but BASIC is so VMS-specific, that is a place where tree-hugging isn't a problem.  (Although, you might argue that all the CLASS_D descriptors should turn into 64-bit variants).

I'm not going to suggesting anything now, just getting a feel for the continue use (intentional and accidental) of VAX floating formats.