On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
> I would propose to go further than that and change the format of Floats
> as well, to make all float-containing objects be usable from the
> platform without special macros. This would require the image startup
> code of the VM (which does the byte swapping) to be modified to swap
> floats as well.
> Alternatively, the code in the image that gets executed upon startup
> could do the swapping, since it should not rely on functioning Floats.

I like this... But I don't have the courage to do such dramatical change. ;)

> 
> However, this opens another, more difficult, question:
> Since doubles on some platforms have to be 8-byte aligned, objects (at
> least those potentially containing doubles) should probably be aligned
> on 8-byte minus 4.
> Would it be possible to modify the object memory to ensure this
> alignment for variableWordSubclasses, at least?

I didn't have problems with this yet...
Doubles need alignment in some plataform, but floats need it too?
I have no experience on the subject. May be the best way to handle this 
is doing what Andreas proposes, i.e. using floats instead of doubles for 
FloatArrays.

Andreas:
	Have you implemented FloatArrays? If so, could you tell me a bit
more about your implementation? I'd like to take a look at your changes.

Luciano.-