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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.std.c,comp.arch.embedded
Subject: Re: Making more of the C standard library mandatory for freestanding implementations
Date: Thu, 07 May 2020 12:54:41 -0700
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Philipp Klaus Krause <pkk@spth.de> writes:
> For many embedded users, memcpy() might be more useful and necessary
> than long long or float. Also, memcpy() is easier to implement than
> support for long long or float. Still the latter are currently mandatory
> for freestanding implementations, while the former is not.

Forth has a core wordset (basically a library) and a bunch of separate
optional wordsets, each of which is standardized.  Floating point
arithmetic is an optional wordset so it's fine if your implementation
doesn't have it.  But if you do choose to supply floating point
features, the standard says what those features should do, so you don't
have to make it up as you go along.

Maybe C could use a similar approach.