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Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 17:05:17 +0100
From: Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>
To: Olivier Andrieu <andrieu@oxygene.ijm.jussieu.fr>
Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: Floating-point classification
Message-ID: <20010125170517.A26956@pauillac.inria.fr>
References: <14956.7306.706689.299369@akasha.ijm.jussieu.fr>
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In-Reply-To: <14956.7306.706689.299369@akasha.ijm.jussieu.fr>; from andrieu@oxygene.ijm.jussieu.fr on Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 12:42:02PM +0100
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> Is there a way to test whether a float has value 'nan' or 'inf' ? I
> didn't find in the standard library the equivalent of libc functions
> isfinite() or isnan() (those are macros I think). 

Right.  Eventually, similar functions should be added to OCaml.
Currently, OCaml provides all math functions specified in ANSI C
(the lowest common denominator of all platforms it supports), but
isfinite(), isnan() and fpclassify() are from ISO C9X, not ANSI C.

> I think that in C you can test if a float is nan by comparing it
> with itself. It seems to work in  OCaml too :

Yes, it works provided the argument to = is statically known to be of
type "float" (so that the float-specific equality operation is
performed instead of generic equality).  As for infinities, you can
also test equality with +inf or -inf.  The following functions should
do the job:

let isnan (x: float) = x <> x
let posinf = 1.0 /. 0.0
let neginf = -. posinf
let isposinf x = x = posinf
let isneginf x = x = neginf
let isfinite x = not(isnan x || isposinf x || isneginf x)

etc, etc.

- Xavier Leroy