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Annotation of researchv9/X11/src/X.V11R1/clients/xcalc/README, revision 1.1.1.1

1.1       root        1: Notes on xcalc:
                      2: 
                      3: I've gotten the sucker to run on an IBM RT, under BSD 4.2, and on a MicroVAX 
                      4: GPX, under Ultrix 1.2.  The RT is lucky enough to have the IEEE math routines.
                      5: Under these routines, if you say "x = 1.0 / 0.0", it doesn't blow up.  
                      6: Instead, when you decide to printf() x, it shows up as "INF".  The routines
                      7: also have the nice feature of being terribly accurate.  Needless to say, this
                      8: all makes writing a calculator fun/E-Z.
                      9: 
                     10: On the MicroVAX, however, I had to use a wretched math package, one that only
                     11: goes between 1E-38 and 1E+38, one that isn't very accurate, and one that will
                     12: cause an FP Exception at the slightest prompting.  As a result, I had to put
                     13: in all sorts of evil nasty 'sigvec's and 'setjmp's and things.  I think it
                     14: takes away from the intrinsic beauty (hah!) of the code, but at least it 
                     15: doesn't say "floating exception:  core dumped" anymore, so it's a step in
                     16: the right direction.
                     17: 
                     18: The point is:  If you're lucky enough to have the IEEE routines, by all means 
                     19: add a -DIEEE to the CFLAGS line in the Makefile.
                     20: 
                     21: -jhb, 3/16/86

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