Re: Integers and standard

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard Maine wrote:

Don't try that one at home, folks. At least not on any machines you are
likely to have at home... or probably at work either. It worked for the
floatting point representations of that machine, but it doesn't work (by
about 300 orders of magnitude) for most machines. All that code had to
be fixed when the sim lab got new computers.

It works for S/360 and successors, but not many others that
I can think of. (I have a P/370 so I can try it at home.
Hercules users can also try it at home.)

Yep. It wasn't a S/360, but it was a machine that used the S/360's
floatting point format (egad, what a horrible format, but that's a
separate matter). I'm having trouble recalling the machine (not a
household word in most households), so I'll just let it go with "S/360
format".

But I was arguing for negative hex constants even if the
bit pattern wasn't known....

Note that the f2008 draft is going in what I would categorize as the
opposite direction from that. See my post of a few minutes ago. In the
f2008 draft, hex constants have no type at all, so applying a sign to
them makes no sense. They are purely bit patterns.

I don't think you are going to get people to go both ways at once on
that. Either they are bit patterns or they are numeric, but not both at
the same time. Bit patterns don't have signs; as soon as you say that
there is a sign, it must be numeric instead of just a bit pattern.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
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