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From: knight@mrco.carleton.ca (Alan Knight)
Subject: Re: Floats and Doubles
Message-ID: <knight.794876067@tina.mrco.carleton.ca>
Sender: news@cunews.carleton.ca (News Administrator)
Reply-To: knight@mrco.carleton.ca (Alan Knight)
Organization: Carleton University
References: <Pine.A32.3.91.950309154508.41166Q-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> <3jposf$duq$1@mhadf.production.compuserve.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 22:54:27 GMT
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In <3jposf$duq$1@mhadf.production.compuserve.com> Greg Hester <74217.1230@CompuServe.COM> writes:

>Any solution for IBM Smalltalk?  Class Double would b ideal.
>Has anyone implemented such a class for IBM Smalltalk?  Is there
>a PD version of Double that would work in IBM Smalltalk (ie. 
>Smalltalk-80)?

IBM Smalltalk floats ARE doubles. That is, they are 8-byte floats.
They don't support single-precision at all. I can happily create
floats much larger than 1.0e44. There does appear to be a bug reading
floats in the neighbourhood of 1.0e308, where Smalltalk hangs (or at
lest goes away for longer than I'm prepared to wait). You should
report this to IBM. I suspect that the bug is that it hangs on
anything outside their float range, but I haven't made any eforts to
confirm this.

-- 
 Alan Knight                | The Object People
 knight@acm.org             | Smalltalk and OO Training and Consulting
 alan_knight@mindlink.bc.ca | 509-885 Meadowlands Dr.
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