10 Jul
2010
10 Jul
'10
5:02 p.m.
Note that the Haskell report does not require IEEE 754 binary encodings. In fact, it permits 'Float' to be a decimal floating point type.
True. Although I don't really understand why? Or rather, I don't understand why it can't be at least slightly more specific and at least state that Float is a 32-bit floating point value and Double is a 64-bit floating point value. The exact handling of various exceptions and denormals tends to vary across hardware, but this at least allows you to get at the representation. I realise it'll be platform-specific (assuming isIEEE returns false), but then so is the behaviour of your code if you don't require IEEE support. ta, Sam