Allowing Unrounded Floating-Point Operations
This is another floating-point optimization. It applies when a VB program compares
the values of floating-point variables in the evaluation of conditional expressions.
Because the variables being compared may not be of the same type, the compiler
performs a rounding operation prior to the actual comparison. This enables it
to compare like types to one another. For example:
Dim singleValue as Single, doubleValue as Double
singleValue = 1
doubleValue = 1
If singleValue = doubleValue Then
‘ do something
End If
Before comparing the values, singleValue is rounded
up to the same precision as doubleValue. Otherwise,
the compiler might decide that 1.000000 doesn’t equal 1.00000000000000,
which would be confusing.
The rounding process takes some extra time, so this optimization enables you
to turn it off. You can avoid any problems this may cause by making sure that
you compare variables that are already the same type as one another.
Removing Safe Pentium FDIV Checks
This is yet another floating-point optimization. Some of Intel’s early
Pentium chips had a bug that affected certain floating-point division calculations.
By default, VB’s mathematical routines guard against the Pentium bug, but
doing the math in VB code is slower than letting the processor chip do it for
you. If you are confident that your programs won’t run on a machine with
the Pentium FDIV bug, you may want to activate this optimization.
