[TUHS] Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>]

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Generally it shouldn't, and didn't.  But Perl assumed you had hardware
floating point, because most architectures did--including S/390--but Perl
on Linux further assumed IEEE 754 floating point, which was implemented in
software on the S/390 (the hardware FP was IBM FP), and, on small and pokey
machines, was really quite slow.

Adam

On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 7:41 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:
>
> > Indeed, S/390 Linux ran just fine on machines without IEEE floating
> > point.  Which meant that for years I had to jam `use integer` at the top
> > of any Perl I ran, because otherwise any Perl arithmetic at all would go
> > through the software float routines, which was very painful on little
> > machines, such as a P/390.
>
> When it comes down to it, why would a kernel need floating point?  Or are
> you talking about the distribution instead of the OS?
>
> -- Dave

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