[issue20904] HAVE_PY_SET_53BIT_PRECISION for m68k

[Mark Dickinson]

Mark Dickinson added the comment:

> I guess they will get fixed over time, or declared unsupported. :-)

Yes, probably.  I'd fully support a move to get rid of that legacy code in Python 3.5.  That would definitely require a python-dev discussion, though (and possibly a PEP): up until now the policy has been that Python just works with whatever floating-point format the platform's C double provides, with no assumptions about IEEE 754, etc.

I think we've mostly fixed the issues on mainstream platforms (e.g., Sun and Intel compilers on x86).  Probably the most troublesome remaining case is ARM / OABI, where I think we still don't have code to deal with the mixed-endian (more strictly, little-endian swapped words) format for C doubles.  There are some online environments (Python via JavaScript, etc.) that also currently use the legacy code.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue20904>
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