Re: [Help-gsl] IEEE doubles/ANSI C questions

[Brian Gough]

Michael Mair writes:
 >    Even if we for a moment assume that C doubles on the considered
 >    architectures are IEEE doubles, there is the still the
 >    overprecision on x86 systems, so the result will of course not
 >    be the same if -ffloat-store is not used (which OTOH would
 >    deteriorate the performance considerably).
Hello,

x86 chips can be put in double precision mode (which is much more
efficient than -ffloat-store).  It happens that the default with most
operating systems is to use extended precision mode, but it's not
necessary.  See the IEEE chapter for details.

 >    Is there a better rationale why one should not prefer long
 >    double?

The size of double is specifically defined (52bit mantissa), while
long double size is always implementation dependent.

 >    Now, I would like to know whether there are experiences or
 >    known problems using GSL with C99 (or the gcc C99 subset
 >    available by gcc -std=c99 -pedantic). The semantics of the
 >    inline keyword differ in gcc -std=gnu89 and C99, but maybe the
 >    referred-to extended autoconf checking helps finding out
 >    whether this works or not.

I haven't tested it with -std=c99 -pedantic but I wouldn't expect any
problems.

-- 
best regards

Brian Gough
(GSL Maintainer)

Network Theory Ltd,
Commercial support for GSL --- http://www.network-theory.co.uk/gsl/