Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Robert Dockins wrote:
What IEEE has done is shoehorned in some values that aren't really numbers into their representation (NaN certainly; one could make a convincing argument that +Inf and -Inf aren't numbers).
I wonder why Infinity has a sign in IEEE floating processing, as well as 0. To support this behaviour uniformly one would need a +0 or -0 offset for each number, which would lead straightforward to non-standard analysis ...
IEEE floats support both affine (signed) and projective (unsigned) infinity. Projective is more natural in some circumstances (since you can do a Möbius transformation from a circle to an infinite line). Haskell, on the othet hand, does not let you specify the mode. -- Lennart