manpages. They are not very related, so separating them makes it
easier to add meaningful cross-references and extend some of the
descriptions.
- Move the part of math(3) that discusses IEEE 754 to the ieee(3)
manpage.
These routines are specified in C99 for the sake of
architectures where an int isn't big enough to represent
the full range of floating-point exponents. However,
even the 128-bit long double format has an exponent smaller
than 15 bits, so for all practical purposes, scalbln() and
scalblnf() are aliases for scalbn() and scalbnf(), respectively.
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
-- Begin comments from J.T. Conklin:
The most significant improvement is the addition of "float" versions
of the math functions that take float arguments, return floats, and do
all operations in floating point. This doesn't help (performance)
much on the i386, but they are still nice to have.
The float versions were orginally done by Cygnus' Ian Taylor when
fdlibm was integrated into the libm we support for embedded systems.
I gave Ian a copy of my libm as a starting point since I had already
fixed a lot of bugs & problems in Sun's original code. After he was
done, I cleaned it up a bit and integrated the changes back into my
libm.
-- End comments
Reviewed by: jkh
Submitted by: jtc
