What is "__fltused" symbol?

[D Spinellis]

In article <204 at ncrday.Dayton.NCR.COM> marlene at ncrday.UUCP () writes:
>In Interactive Systems 386/ix 2.0.2 there is a symbol used in many of the
>routines in the C libraries called "__fltused".  It is not in 386/ix 1.0.6.
>When using the 'nm' command I see it being an external symbol of value 0 
>everywhere, but I never see where it is really defined.  Can anybody tell me
>its type and what it's used for?
It is used by the Microsoft languages to indicate that a floating point
library needs to be loaded.  The symbol is declared as extern in all
code that uses floating point and is defined in the floating point
library.  In this way it forces the library to be loaded when needed.
This is needed because of the way a comprocessor is emulated.  A
program may be using floating point without having any external symbols
defined in a floating point library.

Diomidis
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Diomidis Spinellis                  Internet:                 dds at cc.ic.ac.uk
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