Happy Happy Joy Joy (was: On to Hydro)

[Ben Laurie]

"Mark S. Miller" wrote:
> 
> At 12:18 PM 8/19/00 , Ben Laurie wrote:
> >Eh? Am I being terminally stupid? Surely there are multiple NaNs
> >(+infinity, -infinity and indefinite, for example), and some of them are
> >comparable, e.g. +infinity > -infinity.
> 
> First, in IEEE infinity and -infinity are both distinct, and neither are
> NaNs.  (Given that NaN means "not a number", one could argue that IEEE takes
> the position that infinities are therefore denote numbers, which would is bad
> terminology, but so it goes.)  The infinities are indeed part of the fully
> ordered subset of IEEE floating point values.  IEEE itself also has multiple
> NaNs, but Java has only one.  Java supports a subset of the IEEE spec, but
> AFAIK, in that subset it fully conforms.  Since E's major implementation
> platform is expected to remain Java for some time to come, I need to be
> careful to specify E so that it may be reasonably implemented in Java.
> Therefore, E also conforms to the subset of IEEE chosen by Java.

I can live with that! I guess there's a certain sense in saying that if
it is comparable, then its a number (so infinity is a number). OTOH, if
I can't do arithmetic on it...

Isn't life interesting?

Cheers,

Ben.

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