Comments on Sun's Proposal for Extension of Java Floating Point in JDK 1.2

[Tim Lindholm]

Do you mean did they in the context of the development of Oak?

I don't recall what the visibility of Solaris/x86 was way back then
(1993-94), or if it even existed yet.  But remember that Oak was
originally done in a group that kept itself pretty separate from the
rest of Sun, was developed as though to be a proprietary technology,
and initially had just a few target devices.  Perspectives have changed
a lot since then...

-- Tim

> To: javasoft-spec-commentsaEng, numeric-interestavalidgh.validgh.com
> Subject: Re: Comments on Sun's Proposal for Extension of Java Floating Point 
in JDK 1.2
> Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 15:31:34 -0700
> From: Vaughan Pratt <prattacs.stanford.edu>
> 
> 
> >All seems pretty true.  To the extent (d) is true, it's not as
> >nepotistic as it might appear in retrospect.  At the time this was
> >decided, Java was Oak and the widely cross-platform Internet play that
> >led to Java hadn't been conceived of yet.  Oak only ran on SPARC and
> >using IEEE 754 was the natural choice there.  New processors were
> >mostly implementing IEEE 754.
> 
> Do the Solaris-x86 folk get to talk with the Java folk?
> 
> Vaughan Pratt