On Jul 3, 2006, at 4:17 PM, William D Clinger wrote:

>
> Brad Lucier wrote:
>> I presume you're talking about '387 style arithmetic with 80-bit
>> extended real registers. This architecture has no single-precision or
>> double-precision operations at all, all operations act on extended-
>> precision (80-bit) values in extended-precision registers; so it has
>> *no* "implementation of double precision arithmetic".  The '387 is a
>> correct implementation of IEEE 754 arithmetic,
>
> I presume you mean IEEE 854 arithmetic.

754 is for binary arithmetic; 854 is for other bases (typically
decimal).

Brad