[Python-Dev] Python on non IEEE-754 platforms: plea for information.

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> What non IEEE 754 platforms exist that people care about running Python 
> 2.6, Python 3.0 and higher on?

VMS, that's even supported to some degree in the source tree, and
OS/390 (aka z/OS); patches to support it have been rejected, but
people will likely maintain a fork themselves.

> The major non-IEEE floating-point formats that I know of, on big iron, 
> are the VAX, Cray and IBM formats;  I believe anything else is too old 
> to worry about.  Is this true?

Mostly. For VAX, there exist two double formats: the D format, and the
G format - not sure whether you counted them as two.

> The IBM format is particularly 
> troublesome because it's base 16 instead of base 2 (so e.g. multiplying 
> a float by 2 can lose bits), but it appears that recent IBM machines do 
> both IBM format and IEEE format floating-point.  I assume that the S-390 
> buildbots are using the IEEE side---is this true?

They run Linux, so yes. Notice that other people also run Python on z/OS.

Regards,
Martin