Re: Integers and standard

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

From www.bitsavers.org, it seems that VAX/VMS 1.5 only supported
D float, but by VMS 5.0 both D and G had Fortran support, with
D float the default. I believe that some hardware included
hardware support for G-float, while some did not.

Since we're taking a trip down memory lane...

G_float made its first appearance (along with quad-precision H_float) in a microcode option (with some backplane rewiring) for the VAX-11/780 "Star" called the "Sparkle ECO". The first installation (I was there!) was at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory office in Cambridge, MA. This was 1979. In 1980, the VAX-11/750 "Comet" came out and it had a microcode G+H option that loaded from TU58 tapes (slow and unreliable). The VAX-11/730 "Nebula" (1982?) was the first VAX to have "hardware" support (FPGA) for the G and H formats and was, until the VAX 9000 many years later, the fastest H_float VAX.

VMS also supported software emulation of the G and H instructions - this was added in VMS 2.0 or maybe a bit later. I think that the emulator was originally written by Stan Rabinowitz and I enhanced and maintained it for some years after. I did the integration of the emulator into the VMS exception handler, with the help of VMS devo Kathy Morse.

Subsequent models tended to support G in hardware but not H. I think the MicroVAX I was the only one to not have hardware support for G after that.

VAX FORTRAN support for these types was there as soon as the types existed. You had to choose between D and G formats for your double precision type. REAL*16 was always H. For Alpha, you could choose F/D, F/G or IEEE S/T (as it was termed) formats for floating point. Quad precision was always IEEE-style "X". As noted, the Alpha could load and store D format but would round to 53-bit precision (D had 56) on load.

VAX F and D float were basically taken straight from the PDP-11/44 (different PDP-11 models had different FP formats!) DEC's Mary Payne submitted a proposal styled after VAX G to the IEEE committee standardizing floating point formats, but Kahan's proposal was accepted instead.
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Steve Lionel
Developer Products Division
Intel Corporation
Nashua, NH

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