[texhax] Crosscompilation of TeX

[Philip TAYLOR]

Karl Berry wrote:

 >     Is there any special requirement for TeX & Co. in terms of hardware.
 >
 > No.
 >
 >     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.


Interesting : I had completely forgotten that it uses floating point
at all !  Of course, it eschews floating point wherever it could
affect DVI output, but I see (on looking at the source) that there
are indeed some REAL variables, e.g.,

	var s,@!t: real; {amount of slant}
	@!g:real; {a glue ratio, as a floating point number}

** Phil.