1. Previously, printing the number 1.0 could produce 0x1p+0, 0x2p-1,
0x4p-2, or 0x8p-3, depending on what happened to be convenient. This
meant that printing a value as a double and printing the same value
as a long double could produce different (but equivalent) results.
The change is to always make the leading digit a 1, unless the
number is 0. This solves the aforementioned problem and has
several other advantages.
2. Use the FPU to do rounding. This is far simpler and more portable
than manipulating the bits, and it fixes an obsure round-to-even
bug. It also raises the exceptions now required by IEEE 754R.
The drawbacks are that it is usually slightly slower, and it makes
printf less effective as a debugging tool when the FPU is hosed
(e.g., due to a buggy softfloat implementation).
3. On i386, twiddle the rounding precision so that (2) works properly
for long doubles.
4. Make several simplifications that are now possible due to (2).
5. Split __hldtoa() into a separate file.
Thanks to remko for access to a sparc64 box for testing.
in contributed sources with just a hack made possible
by bsd.sys.mk,v 1.33. This is better because it just
nulls out the warning flags rather than adding gcc(1)
specific -w option to CFLAGS.
package, a more recent, generalized set of routines. Among the
changes:
- Declare strtof() and strtold() in stdlib.h.
- Add glue to libc to support these routines for all kinds
of ``long double''.
- Update printf() to reflect the fact that dtoa works slightly
differently now.
As soon as I see that nothing has blown up, I will kill
src/lib/libc/stdlib/strtod.c. Soon printf() will be able
to use the new routines to output long doubles without loss
of precision, but numerous bugs in the existing code must
be addressed first.
Reviewed by: bde (briefly), mike (mentor), obrien