Re: [q-lang-users] Q 7.2 RC1 Issue 3: IEEE floats

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> But none of "on inf", "-inf", or "nan" has the correct meaning input.
> This should be cleaned up.

I don't understand, what's "on inf"?

Defining inf and nan as const variables in the library would probably do 
the trick. In fact, this is what I do (for inf) in some of my scripts.

> Furthermore, currently an attempt to do a floating-point division by
> zero is made to fail, rather than returning the IEEE-appropriate results
> (negative or positive infinity, unless the numerator is also zero,
> in which case NaN).

That's easy to fix. If I don't hear any objections, I'll do that tomorrow.

> This should be cleaned up by defining a syntax for these values to
> be used on input and output, and by not failing when doing a floating
> division by zero (though an exact division by zero should still fail).

Is there a portable way to check for inf and nan values? (So that I 
don't have to rely on the C library to do the right thing when printing 
those numbers.)

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag