5 Nov
2004
5 Nov
'04
8:57 a.m.
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 ... Prelude> 1/0.0 Infinity Prelude> -1/0.0 -Infinity Prelude> -0.0 -0.0 Prelude> 1.0-1.0 0.0 Prelude> -(1.0-1.0) -0.0 Thus (a-b) is not the same as -(b-a) for IEEE floats!