Re: Compiler Correctness

Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich@compuserve.de> wrote:
>Ambiguities also can arise from different models or precision, as
>implemented in specific FPU hardware. Doesn't this imply that a correct
>compiler must emulate all floating point operations, so that the output
>does not depend on the host machine of the compiler?


Not *necessarily*, although (as I said in a previous message) that may be
a sensible thing to do on general principles.


IEEE floating point, in particular, is sufficiently tightly specified and
sufficiently widely used that a careful cross-compiler running on an IEEE
machine could mostly use its host floating-point hardware to emulate the
floating point of many target machines. (It might have to resort to
software emulation in some tricky areas.)


>The operation of the Intel coprocessor (x87) is configurable, and this
>configuration can be changed at runtime.


That's true of IEEE FPUs in general, not just the x86 one.


>In this case a "correct" compiler has to assure that, after every
>call to external code, the FPU configuration is restored to the
>expected state.


Indeed so. Modern language definitions increasingly are specifying the
details of where FPU state changes, which state changes propagate into and
out of a called routine, etc. With an older language spec, there's room
for implementer judgement about how things should work, but that's no
different from many other areas.
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