(2) numeric fdlibm

[David Chase]

At 03:05 PM 8/1/2002 -0700, David G Hough at validlab.com wrote:
>A couple of years ago Stephen Moshier wrote:
> 
> It is well known that fdlibm as originally posted was riddled with
> pointer aliasing bugs and other portability problems.  You can get the
> benefit of other people's debugging efforts by looking at the Cygnus,
> DJGPP, linux glibc, or perhaps BSD versions.  The Cygnus one is at
>   ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/newlib/

In particular, this code is not as portable as claimed, since it simply
uses unions, which are not (last I recall) even required to overlap their
fields, though they generally seem to.  The fields also need to be
"volatile" to stifle optimizer-revealed bugs.

David Chase