Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2017-05-14 15:59:09 -0400, Greg Stark wrote:
>> Personally while I would like to avoid code that actively crashes or
>> fails basic tests on Vax
> I personally vote for simply refusing to run/compile on non-IEEE
> platforms, including VAX.
The point of wanting that is not because anybody thinks that VAX per
se is an interesting platform anymore. The point is to avoid locking
ourselves into narrow assumptions that we may need to break someday.
Saying "nobody cares about floats other than IEEE floats" is morally
indistinguishable from saying "nobody cares about running on any
platform except Windows", which was a depressingly common opinion
back in the nineties or so.
It may well be that we can get away with saying "we're not going
to make it simple to move hash-partitioned tables with float
partition keys between architectures with different float
representations". But there's a whole lot of daylight between that
and denying any support for float representations other than the
currently-most-popular one.
regards, tom lane