[PPL-devel] More floating point problems on the Alpha

[Joe Buck]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 09:41:05PM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Sep 2008, Joe Buck wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 09:56:30PM +0200, Abramo Bagnara wrote:
> > > The problem come from the fact that for astonishing reasons 1.4e-45f is
> > > not seen as 1.4e-45.
> > 
> > Why is this astonishing?  The smallest positive single-precision IEEE
> > floating point number is roughly 1.175494e-38.  Since user-specified
> > numbers are rounded to the closest representable value, 1.4e-45f is
> > a fancy way of typing zero.
> 
> The smallest subnormal value is approximately 1.40129846e-45F 
> (__FLT_DENORM_MIN__).  The obvious conclusion is that subnormal support is 
> broken or disabled on Alpha by default.

OK.  I apologize for the noise.