> Well, I haven't studied this to such a great detail because I (according > to Kahan) belong to the group of people who "don't care about floating > point accuracy because their code is so robust they can even run on > Cray's", but doesn't this mean that we can solve it in the compiler by > having its run time library provide this functionality ?
You are mixing issues, the issue of extra precision on the x86 has nothing whatever with whether or not such values can be stored in memory (they can), and Kahan's inaccurate impression that there is a problem in extending the stack, if indeed you are quoting him accurately, is not relevant. > Given that most modern compilations on x86 hardware would use SSE, we > could at least comfort the users who do want to use the extra bits of > 80-bit floating point land ... long double works just fine right now
