[texhax] Crosscompilation of TeX

[Philip TAYLOR]

Uwe Lück wrote:

 > At 20:37 10.03.06, Karl Berry wrote:
 >
 >>     E.g. the ARM-processor does not contain a floating point unit.
 >>
 >> There is actually a long-standing (as in decades old) patch from Knuth
 >> to make the TeX code use only fixed point arithmetic.  I admit I am not
 >> sure whether it's applied in the current distributions.
 >
 >
 > According to the Wikipedia article on TeX, "fixed point arithmetic only"
 > is an essential feature of TeX.

Never believe Wikis :-)  Fixed-point arithmetic is an essential
feature of TeX only where the use of reals could affect DVI output.
If you look at TeX.web, you will see that there /are/ places where
"foo: real" is used!

	@!g:real; {a glue ratio, as a floating point number}
	@!glue_temp:real; {glue value before rounding}
	@!cur_glue:real; ...

** Phil.