floats and doubles on a VAX 750 with an FPA

[gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA]

From:      Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA>

(Note: I moved this response from Unix-Wizards to Info-C.)

I think the ANSI C committee's decision not to REQUIRE that floats
be handled in single-precision, but to encourage it when it is
"natural" for the architecture, is quite proper.  It is likely
that market pressure will cause C compiler vendors to convert to
single-precision float arithmetic when this yields faster, smaller
code.  Conversely, on architectures where double-precision is more
natural (PDP-11?) there will be no additional penalty imposed.