Okay, here's the decree. FP constants in the bytecode file constants section will be 64-bit IEEE floats.
The Q&A as to why. (This'll be a new feature for all the declarations of arbitrary decisions) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why? A: Gotta have something Q: Why 64-bit IEEE? A: Pretty much everyone's got them, and if they don't they can fake it. Q: What about endianness? A: Native endianness. Byteswapping's easy enough. Q: Why not bigger? A: Not everyone's got bigger Q: They can use bignums! A: No they can't. FP numbers are base 2, bignums aren't. Conversion's not lossless Q: Then truncate the numbers! A: Right. Chop 10.3e+100 to 10.3e+38? Don't think so. Q: But, but, but... A: Listen, FP numbers are for shortcuts and constants that get stuffed in N registers. Most things will be using PMC variables, in which case conversion's expected. Q: But what about the integer constants? A: Those are capped at 32-bits. I don't think you want to use them as a counter-example. Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk