$NetBSD: README.txt,v 1.1 2000/06/06 08:15:02 bjh21 Exp $ Package Overview for SoftFloat Release 2a John R. Hauser 1998 December 13 SoftFloat is a software implementation of floating-point that conforms to the IEC/IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. SoftFloat is distributed in the form of C source code. Compiling the SoftFloat sources generates two things: -- A SoftFloat object file (typically `softfloat.o') containing the complete set of IEC/IEEE floating-point routines. -- A `timesoftfloat' program for evaluating the speed of the SoftFloat routines. (The SoftFloat module is linked into this program.) The SoftFloat package is documented in four text files: softfloat.txt Documentation for using the SoftFloat functions. softfloat-source.txt Documentation for compiling SoftFloat. softfloat-history.txt History of major changes to SoftFloat. timesoftfloat.txt Documentation for using `timesoftfloat'. Other files in the package comprise the source code for SoftFloat. Please be aware that some work is involved in porting this software to other targets. It is not just a matter of getting `make' to complete without error messages. I would have written the code that way if I could, but there are fundamental differences between systems that I can't make go away. You should not attempt to compile SoftFloat without first reading both `softfloat.txt' and `softfloat-source.txt'. At the time of this writing, the most up-to-date information about SoftFloat and the latest release can be found at the Web page `http:// HTTP.CS.Berkeley.EDU/~jhauser/arithmetic/SoftFloat.html'.