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From: Ken Rose <kenarose@earthlink.net>
To: Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr>
Cc: Michael Vanier <mvanier@cs.caltech.edu>,
	gaurav_chanda@lycos.com, caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Catching exceptions into strings
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 09:10:38 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <3D0E09FE.663C32D8@earthlink.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20020617144811.B29486@pauillac.inria.fr>

Xavier Leroy wrote:

> > I tried this with java and was interested to find that integer
> > division by zero is caught but floating point division by zero isn't.
> 
> It is "caught" not as an exception, but by returning the appropriate
> values defined for this very purpose in IEEE arithmetic:
>      1.0 / 0.0 = +Inf   -1.0 / 0.0 = -Inf   0.0 / 0.0 = NaN
> This might not seem natural to you, but it's the result of years of
> arguing among numerical experts, and is the standard towards which
> both hardware and programming languages converge.

I'm shooting from the hip here, having not even looked in the manual,
but a good compromise might be some NaN-to-exception functions that are
identity operations if the parameter is a regular number, but that raise
exceptions if it's )for example) an infinity, or a NaN, or denormal, or
perhaps others.

 - ken
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  reply	other threads:[~2002-06-17 16:10 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2002-06-10 14:27 Gaurav Chanda
2002-06-10 15:07 ` Xavier Leroy
2002-06-10 21:57 ` Michael Vanier
2002-06-12  8:53   ` Xavier Leroy
2002-06-12  9:36     ` Michael Vanier
2002-06-17 12:48       ` Xavier Leroy
2002-06-17 16:10         ` Ken Rose [this message]
2002-06-11  9:23 ` Guillaume Valadon
2002-06-11 13:28   ` David Chase
2002-06-11 15:37     ` Xavier Leroy
2002-06-11 17:44       ` David Chase
2002-06-12  8:33         ` Xavier Leroy
2002-06-11 21:19       ` Michael Vanier
2002-06-14 21:23       ` John Carr
2002-06-17 12:31         ` Xavier Leroy
2002-06-17 21:08           ` John Carr

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