[Python-Dev] Python 2.6/3.0, IEEE 754 floating point semantics and S60 (original) (raw)

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Fri Nov 28 18:47:25 CET 2008

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Torne Wuff <torne-pythondev at wolfpuppy.org.uk> wrote:

Thanks for hunting down all that information! I'm in agreement: we should fix this so that it works for 17 digits.

Cool. I think this should make porting easier (and not just for Python, either).

Are you aware of any compliance suite, test vectors, etc we could 'borrow' to verify our implementation?

Not really. Some googling turns up a few links, notably this one:

http://www.cant.ua.ac.be/ieeecc754.html

It looks a little old, and possibly unmaintained, but even if you can't get the C driver to compile then the test vectors might still be usable.

Python doesn't require that the platform is IEEE 754 compliant, so there isn't much IEEE 754-specific stuff in the Python test suite.

Thank you again for your messages; it's very useful to know that (1) IEEE 754 compliance is intended, and (2) there are people at Symbian who care about fixing non-compliance issues. It makes the currently fairly insane activity of trying to write cross-platform floating-point C code that's going to work on any system that Python might ever be run on just that little bit saner. :)

Mark

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