Float Double Parameters

[Bob Mabee, Software]

In article <139200025 at uiucdcsb> kenny at uiucdcsb.CS.UIUC.EDU writes:
>						When BCPL was built for the
>635, it borrowed the existing Fortran library and hence had to adopt the
>convention that all float's are promoted to double's for parameter passing.

When DMR put an obsolete version of BCPL on the GE 645, it had no support
for floating-point operations.  We added floating-point operators and
constants during the port from CTSS to the 360.  Later I wrote a new code
generator for the GE 645 (the first BCPL to generate binary directly), and
added the floating-point operators here too, and transcendentals written in
BCPL.  Other functions would have come from the PL/I Multics environment,
which did support single precision.

In any case, BCPL is typeless and would not have known to convert number
formats on function calls.