Best (CD Bootable?) Linux Distro for Dominions?

[Cainehill]

[quote] alexti:
[QB]I'm curious. Is it possible to fix Johan's problem with just grouping by parenthesises? How would you rewrite the expression for that? [\qb]

Well, if "It was something about the windows compiler not doing math formulas in quite the same order as generic open OS compilers" then odds are that the use of parathensises, and breaking the formula down into discrete lines of code, would take care of it.

Hard to say how to rewrite the expression without seeing the source code and expression, but the complex multiline statements often used to express formulas are a common source of problems. The C++ standard left a few too many things (like order of evaluation) undefined, meaning that even on the same platform, different compilers give different results. This is even without accounting for compiler inadequacies, where there is currently only one (Comeau / EDG) available that is approximately 100% compliant with the standard. (Last I knew, Comeau didn't support "export" on templates, but then, no one does.)

Another likely culprit, though, would be automatic promotion of floats to doubles - different compilers handle it differently, leading to some wildly disparate results. Again, often best handled through explicit casting, and breaking long statements into short ones, such that intermediate results aren't left to compiler whims.

Anyways - use of parenthesises, and breaking complex lines of code (especially calculation heavy code) down into shorter, simpler, statements makes multiplatform life _much_ easier.

Cainehill (whose Last job involved a lot of graphics, GUIs, and modeling & simulation with the same source on different hardware platforms and OSs)