<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Generally it shouldn't, and didn't. But Perl assumed you had hardware floating point, because most architectures did--including S/390--but Perl on Linux further assumed IEEE 754 floating point, which was implemented in software on the S/390 (the hardware FP was IBM FP), and, on small and pokey machines, was really quite slow.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div>Adam<br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 7:41 PM Dave Horsfall <<a href="mailto:dave@horsfall.org">dave@horsfall.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:<br>
<br>
> Indeed, S/390 Linux ran just fine on machines without IEEE floating <br>
> point. Which meant that for years I had to jam `use integer` at the top <br>
> of any Perl I ran, because otherwise any Perl arithmetic at all would go <br>
> through the software float routines, which was very painful on little <br>
> machines, such as a P/390.<br>
<br>
When it comes down to it, why would a kernel need floating point? Or are <br>
you talking about the distribution instead of the OS?<br>
<br>
-- Dave</blockquote></div></div>