From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] fun and scary evil C code
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:29:55 -0500
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> Does C99 or any other C mandate the actual memory layout
> of floats and doubles or the exact conversion of constant  
> representations?
> I'm fairly sure they somehow mandate IEEE 754 properties,
> but do they actually say that floats and doubles have to be stored  
> exactly that way in 4 or 8 bytes?
> 
> Even if we assume sizeof(double) == 8,
> what if my implementation is perverse and interleaves the exponent  
> bits amongst the mantissa bits?
> Where is this disallowed in the standard(s)?

It doesn't matter what the standard says; it matters what implementations do.
C implementations are going to provide what the underlying
hardware does, and almost all hardware does IEEE 754.

> as long as the conversion you're after has an exact ieee representation,
> i can't see how two compliant implementations could come up with
> differing representations.  (two different numbers can't have the same
> ieee representation, except -0 and +0.)  the conversion process doesn't
> need any floating point itself and the only interpolation comes when
> numbers don't have exact representations.

Historically, it has not always been true that decimal <-> binary
conversion of doubles has been precise enough to replicate a 
specific bit pattern.  While conversion doesn't require floating
point, it is often done in floating point anyway for convenience.

Russ