[issue27444] Python doesn't build due to test_float.py broken on non-IEEE machines

[Mark Dickinson]

Mark Dickinson added the comment:

[David]

> maybe Mark will be interested, but he probably doesn't have time either.  Also, he's been known to say he'd like to drop support for non-IEEE architectures ;)

Exactly correct on all counts. :-) I'm *very* interested: I've been looking for a non-IEEE machine to play with Python on for years. But time is (as ever) in short supply.

Realistically, maintaining support for non-IEEE 754 platforms looks like something with an enormously high cost/benefit ratio; maintaining just on machines with (some approximation of) IEEE 754 is already enough work.

Greg: you say "there are other non-ieee platforms out there". Can you point me to any current hardware using non-IEEE 754 floating-point formats that one might want to run Python on? I know there are examples where not all of the IEEE 754 standard is supported, but the interchange format used is still IEEE 754 binary64 / binary32 / whatever, but that's not what I'm looking for; I'm looking for cases where the underlying format is different. The only example I'm aware of is the IBM System z, with its hexadecimal floating-point format, but those machines support IEEE 754 too.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue27444>
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