Floating Point-How Important to Unix?

[Ed G.]

> 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.

My guess is that the floating point code is dragged in when certain 
library routines (e.g., printf and libc) are used, even if the 
floating point features of the routines are not used.

Consider this:

Two programs hello.c and nothing.c, identical except that hello.c 
contains a single printf("hello world\n") inside main.  nothing.c 
has nothing in its main loop.  

Program--Size--Number of FPOs Reported by my perl script
===========================================
nothing.c, 312 bytes, 2
hello.c, 4804 bytes, 115

See what I mean?

Ed

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