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A classic example of trying to define behaviour regardless of what all the different hardware does is Java choosing IEEE754 floating point. Which isn't natively supported on x86.

https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf

If C had standardised to the idiosyncracies of the PDP-11, it might have held back its development.

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>Java choosing IEEE754 floating point. Which isn't natively supported on x86.

IEEE754 was based on the design of the 8087, and it's been native on x86 since the 80387.

The problem with Java choosing IEEE754 was, according to the paper you linked, not that it wasn't supported on all hardware, but that Java didn't follow the spec completely,

"Later we shall see why Java’s expanded market would be served better by actual conformity to the letter and spirit of IEEE Standard 754"

Are you referring to 80-bit floats used by the (long obsolete) x87 FPUs?

The 80-bit floats were still in use right through the 2000s; I know because I had to work out what option to use to get reproducible fp rounding on 64-bit doubles in 32-bit C. I've not had occasion to look at the details of amd64 fp.

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