GDC release 0.23

[Frits van Bommel]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Anders F Björklund wrote:
>>>> GDC now supports 64-bit targets! A new x86_64 Linux binary is
>>>> available and the MacOS X binary supports x86_64 and ppc64.
>>>
>>> Excellent news! I'll try it on ppc64 Linux too (Fedora Core)
>>
>> Except for some strange (temporary?) build error with soft-float,
>> it built just fine for powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu (with FC5/PPC*)
> 
> That reminds me.  Is it really a good idea to map the GCC/PPC "long 
> double" to "real" in D?  I know this has come up before:
> 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/20790.html
> 
> and the data type seems like an aberration.  Here is some more info:
> 
[snip references]
> 
> I can't claim to have the maths background of some folks here, but this 
> suggests to me that this 128-bit representation isn't truly IEEE-754 
> compliant and therefore probably shouldn't be a default data type in D?

 From reading that I get the impression that this "long double" is 
actually two doubles that software pretends to be a more-precise single 
number. If that's correct, I think this may indeed be a bad idea.
I'm also pretty sure it's in fact against the spec: 
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/type.html describes 'real' as the "largest 
hardware implemented floating point size". And this data type seems to 
be software-implemented rather than hardware-implemented...