Re: 9.4 broken on alpha

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> A useful comparison point is the testing Greg Stark did recently for VAX.
> Certainly no-one's ever again going to try to get useful work done with
> Postgres on a VAX, but that still taught us some good things about
> unnecessary IEEE-floating-point dependencies that had snuck into the code.
> Someday, that might be important; IEEE 754 won't be the last word on
> float arithmetic forever.
>

Just by the way, there is at least one example of a non-IEEE floating
point format supported by a current production compiler and hardware: IBM
XL C on z/OS (and possibly other platforms) can use either IEEE or IBM's
hex float format, depending on a compiler option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Floating_Point_Architecture

--
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com