Floating Point-How Important to Unix?

[Greg Lehey]

On Wed,  8 April 1998 at  0:27:40 -0400, Ed G. wrote:
>> 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?

I don't see that this proves anything.  You really need to look at
those words and see how they are used.

Greg

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