[Python-Dev] Python 2.6/3.0, IEEE 754 floating point semantics and S60

[Mark Dickinson]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Torne Wuff
<torne-pythondev at wolfpuppy.org.uk> wrote:
> Thanks for hunting down all that information! I'm in agreement: we
> should fix this so that it works for 17 digits.

Cool.  I think this should make porting easier (and not just for
Python, either).

> Are you aware of any compliance suite, test vectors, etc we could
> 'borrow' to verify our implementation?

Not really. Some googling turns up a few links, notably this one:

http://www.cant.ua.ac.be/ieeecc754.html

It looks a little old, and possibly unmaintained, but even if you can't
get the C driver to compile then the test vectors might still be usable.

Python doesn't require that the platform is IEEE 754 compliant,
so there isn't much IEEE 754-specific stuff in the Python test suite.

Thank you again for your messages;  it's *very* useful to know that
(1) IEEE 754 compliance is intended, and (2) there are people at
Symbian who care about fixing non-compliance issues.  It makes the
currently fairly insane activity of trying to write cross-platform
floating-point C code that's going to work on any system that
Python might ever be run on just that little bit saner. :)

Mark