Re: new file, oct-mem.h

[Rik]

>
> These rely on zero-valued floating point numbers having all bits zero,
> which is not guaranteed by C/C++.  But it is guaranteed by the IEEE
> 754 format.  I don't think it is a bad thing to require IEEE 754 (many
> things in Octave won't work properly without IEEE floating point
> math), but maybe we should state that assumption clearly with a
> configure test?  Oh, OK, this requirement is more or less enforced now
> in octave_ieee_init.  So maybe this is OK as it is, though I guess I
> would prefer to have a comment stating the assumption here, and perhaps
> also an easy way to disable this optimization if someone wanted to
> experiment with Octave on a system with a different floating point
> format.
>   
Isn't the configure check preferable in that it catches the assumption
at compile time rather than run time?   It would be annoying to spend 45
minutes compiling the sources only to have octave complain and demand to
be re-compiled with the correct IEEE flags.  But, perhaps I'm not
understanding the situation.

--Rik