float("nan") in set or as key

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Fri Jun 3 16:35:12 EDT 2011


On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 6:27 AM, Carl Banks <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Really?  I am claiming that, even if everyone and their mother thought exceptions were the best thing ever, NaN would have been added to IEEE anyway because most hardware didn't support exceptions.  Therefore the fact that NaN is in IEEE is not any evidence that NaN is a good idea.

Uhh, noob question here. I'm way out of my depth with hardware floating point.

Isn't a signaling nan basically the same as an exception? Which would
imply that the hardware did support exceptions (if it did indeed
support IEEE floating point, which specifies signalling nan)?

Chris Angelico



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