On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
A useful comparison point is the testing Greg Stark did recently for VAX. Certainly no-one's ever again going to try to get useful work done with Postgres on a VAX, but that still taught us some good things about unnecessary IEEE-floating-point dependencies that had snuck into the code. Someday, that might be important; IEEE 754 won't be the last word on float arithmetic forever.
Just by the way, there is at least one example of a non-IEEE floating point format supported by a current production compiler and hardware: IBM XL C on z/OS (and possibly other platforms) can use either IEEE or IBM's hex float format, depending on a compiler option.
