Virtual PC and IEEE math: readers and Connectix reply

Regarding our previous item titled "Virtual PC versions 3 and 4 do invalid IEEE mathematics," several readers took exception to the assertions of the article:

"I would have thought that the (much) broader issue is the implication that Wintel platforms do not correctly perform IEEE-compliant floating- point mathematical operations. Why blame it on VPC, or - by implication - the Mac? While the emulation may be faulty, if the report is correct, it suggests that Windows itself is non-standard." [Richard Outerbridge]

"I would alter your title and comments to say that VPC doesn't do Pentium math but does do IEEE math. The title implies IEEE made a mistake or VPC doesn't implement IEEE stuff. They are just passing math exception error messages of PPC's according to IEEE rather than Intel rules." [Steven Kolins]

"The problem is not that the IEEE math is invalid; the 'problem' is that VPC does not emulate the bugs in the Pentium. Now, it might be valid to argue that VPC should be bug-for-bug compatible with a Pentium, but that's a different subject." [Jim Hamilton]

Connectix offered this reply on the matter: "We would like to thank Bill Gletsos for pointing this out. We believe we have a prototype version of VPC that already fixes these problems. Emulating the exceptions portion of IEEE floating point math of a Pentium on a PowerPC is somewhat tricky."