On 12/14/2010 6:48 AM, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
> Matthew Fulmer<tapplek at gmail.com>  writes:
>
>> Croquet (and thus Open Cobalt) requires that squeak images
>> perform floating point operations bit-identically across
>> machines
>
> This paper is must read:
>
> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf

Not for Croquet. This paper is just one of the longest rants in a long 
series complaining about "ZOMG, Java doesn't expose all the control 
required in IEEE 754, how *dare* they claim to be IEEE compliant???". 
Croquet's requirements are much simpler - Croquet doesn't require IEEE 
754 compliance, it merely requires the same results across all platforms 
(whether IEEE 754 or not).

The paper does contain some valuable information for a language 
designer. But unfortunately the good bits are buried in about a hundred 
pages of ranting making it hard to actually find the essence of what 
they say should be done.

Cheers,
   - Andreas