[kaffe] more on float_min and underflow

[Riccardo]

Hello

I did a careful study of the minimum and maximum value.

I studied the limits.h of several machines, including sparc and mips. 
Those always have a minimum of approx. 1/2 e-38 which is very reasonable, 
read further below.

I then studied:
http://research.microsoft.com/~hollasch/cgindex/coding/ieeefloat.html

and referenced for Java:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/lexical.doc.html#
230798

as well as

http://www.ce.utwente.nl/javapp/information/CTJ/ctj-doc/constant-values.
html

and as a final stage I studied the Motorola 68040 manual, being the 68k 
fpu one of the de-facto standard that led to the making of IEE 754 
together with intel 8087.

Page 9-8, table 9-3 is very explicit

for single precision real format, the approximate ranges are:
Maximum positive Normalized: 3.4 10^38
Minimum positive Normalized: 1.2 10^-38
Minimum positive Denormalized: 1.4 10^-45

So the conclusion is: standard wisdom and usage on most unix system and 
processors and so the standard libraries on them and common C use define 
the limits with the NORMALIZED numbers.

Java spec defines the minimum as a Denormalized number.

On one side that is what I temporarily did on IRIX/MIPS: I just 
substituted the constant. I seem to have gotten an improvment but I will 
conduct further tests.

On the long run however I want to see a more general solution which I 
see as difficult since the libraries use different assumptions than Java.

One "half way solution" would be to use one or the other constants 
depending on a flag if the constant is "troublesome" or not on some 
platforms. Maybe this could be checked by autoconf.

I tried some experiments with atof and strtod but for now I failed to 
get some useful result.

-Riccardo