Floating Point-How Important to Unix?

[Greg Lehey]

On Tue,  7 April 1998 at 23:25:33 -0400, Ed G. wrote:
>> How did you recognize the instructions words?  Just because it's in
>> the text segment doesn't mean it's instructions.
>
> Yes, this occurred to me too.  My perl script doesn't do any fancy
> decoding; it just looks for words beginning with octal 17.  After
> some thought I came to the conclusion that the percentage of data
> words miscounted as floating pt. ops (FPOs) is negligible.
>
> Here's my reasoning--tell me what you think:
>
> (reasoning omitted)

You don't say whether you restricted your search to the text segment.
Anyway, at this point, I would have modified the script somewhat to
display the locations of the words, and then would have looked at the
text with adb to see what purpose they serve.  Considering that
floating point was an option, I find it hard to believe that so many
programs, in particular things like tar, would use FP.

Greg

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