[m-dev.] Re: for review: accumulator introduction

[Fergus Henderson]

On 07-Jun-1999, Lee Naish <lee at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> Peter Ross <petdr at cs.mu.OZ.AU> writes:
> >+/* XXX introducing accumulators for floating point numbers can be bad.
> 
> Best mention the reason: the operations are typically *not* associative.
> There should be some way to locally prevent the order of floating point
> operations being changed by the compiler.
> 
> For that matter, the same applies to ints (because of overflow).  This
> should at least be XXX documented.

Yes.  I think it would make sense to add a compiler option,
in the "language semantics options" section, to control this.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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