lfpinit() signed or unsigned?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo.de>:
> Gary E. Miller writes:
> >> There is nothing to normalize in a l_fp  All bit patterns are valid.
> >
> > Sort of.  The header notes imply the integral and fractional part may be
> > signed or unsigned.  Separately.  I have not confirmed if the code use
> > that.
> 
> No, most certainly not.  What you're looking at really is a simple 64bit
> integer type that needs to be scaled by 2^-32 in order to be interpreted
> in seconds.  It's not a separate number format or anything like that and
> I suspect most of the uses of the integer and fractional half were
> initially inserted in order to more effectively deal with that type on
> machines with only 32bit arithmetic.  I don't think that's still a valid
> concern, but those half-word accesses may be hard to excise from the
> code.

I confirm that Achim is correct.  I had to grok all this stuff while
turning the type into a scalar.
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