Re: [Sbcl-devel] Re: Printing/reading INF and NaN without #.

[James Y K. <fo...@fu...>]

On Nov 14, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Raymond Toy wrote:
> Seems to me that if you're playing with float infinities, you'd have
> overflow disabled, and, most-likely, divide-by-zero too.

Not necessarily -- it's perfectly natural to have traps enabled, yet  
still want to introduce an explicit infinity into your data. The  
trapping rules allow this to occur sensibly -- most manipulation of  
the introduced infinity doesn't cause additional traps. A  
representation for infinity that requires fp traps to be off is not  
workable. (I don't think anyone has proposed one of those yet).

James