This issue tracker has been migrated to GitHub, and is currently read-only.
For more information, see the GitHub FAQs in the Python's Developer Guide.

Author mark.dickinson
Recipients mark.dickinson, r.david.murray, skrah, stark, tim.peters
Date 2016-07-05.08:01:26
SpamBayes Score -1.0
Marked as misclassified Yes
Message-id <1467705688.17.0.598486830658.issue27444@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
In-reply-to
Content
[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.
History
Date User Action Args
2016-07-05 08:01:28mark.dickinsonsetrecipients: + mark.dickinson, tim.peters, r.david.murray, skrah, stark
2016-07-05 08:01:28mark.dickinsonsetmessageid: <1467705688.17.0.598486830658.issue27444@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2016-07-05 08:01:28mark.dickinsonlinkissue27444 messages
2016-07-05 08:01:26mark.dickinsoncreate