freely distributable libm

[news]

I sent this out once but it seems to have gotten stuck.   Sorry if you
get it twice.

Dr. K-C Ng has developed a new version of libm that is the basis for
the bundled /usr/lib/libm.so in Solaris 2.3 for SPARC and for future
Solaris 2 releases for x86 and PowerPC.   It provides the standard
functions necessary to pass the usual test suites.
This new libm can be configured to handle exceptions in accordance with
various language standards or in the spirit of IEEE 754.
The C source code should be portable to any IEEE 754 system with minimal
difficulties.

In the interest of elevating the minimum acceptable level of quality in
math libraries, SunPro has decided to make K-C's work freely distributable
subject only the restriction that its origin be acknowledged.   C source is
currently available at the sunsite ftp system; here is an example
session:

ftp sunsite.unc.edu             [Sun employees use iftp -a sunsite.unc.edu]
Name ...
Password ...
ftp>
ftp> cd /uploads
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> bin
200 Type set to I.
ftp> get fdlibm-5.1.tar.Z
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for fdlibm-5.1.tar.Z (117889 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
local: fdlibm-5.1.tar.Z remote: fdlibm-5.1.tar.Z
117889 bytes received in 20 seconds (5.8 Kbytes/s)
ftp>bye
221 Goodbye.

Remember that anything free comes with no guarantee.  But
you may send comments and bug reports to:
                fdlibm-commentsasunpro.eng.sun.com

Note that fdlibm contains no additional functions
beyond those required by various standards;
the additional functions that used to be part of Sun libm
will be distributed in a new library libsunmath.a that will
be shipped with the unbundled SunPro compilers.