Re: [Caml-list] Weird behavior with nan's and min/max

["Yaron Minsky" <yminsky@cs.cornell.edu>]

Your explanation matches my general understanding of the bug, and why it's
hard to fix.  One thing that I think should be fixed, though, is the
documentation.  This is really a surprising little bug, and it would be
nice to have it mentioned in the documentation somewhere, perhaps as a
footnote of sorts to the definition of equality.

Here's a related question:  how to test if a float is nan efficiently?  I
know two ways: seeing if it's not equal to itself, and using
Pevasives.classify_float.  The performance difference is pretty
interesting.  Here are the performance results I got for 100,000
iterations.

Time for classify nan : 0.001205 secs
Time for classify norm: 0.001205 secs
Time for eqtest nan   : 0.093635 secs
Time for eqtest norm  : 0.000302 secs

I'm quite surprised that the equality test is so slow on nan's.  Is this
just a feature of x86 hardware?  Are there any other options for testing
for nan-ness?

y

>> Now here's the weird bit.  I decided I wanted a polymorphic comparison
>> that wouldn't have this problem.  But this is a little harder than it
>> seems, since it turns out that specialized float version of equality is
>> different from the polymorphic version.
>
> Yes, it's a long-standing bug for which we haven't yet a good
> solution.  More exactly, there are two problematic solutions:
>
> 1- Fix polymorphic equality so that it behaves like IEEE equality on
> floats,
> i.e. it always returns false when one of its arguments is NaN.
> The problem is that this breaks the implication
>         x == y  imply  x = y
> and thus the current implementation of polymorphic equality needs to
> be made less efficient.  Currently, x = y starts by testing x == y
> and returns true if the pointer equality holds.  But this could be the
> wrong result according to the new specification, since x can contain
> an NaN somewhere.  Hence, polymorphic equality would have to traverse
> its two arguments even when they are physically the same.  The
> performance impact of this change on real programs is unknown.
>
> 2- As J M Skaller proposed, change the behavior of polymorphic
> equality and its version specialized to floats so that nan = nan
> and nan <> x if x <> nan.  Similar changes need to be done on the
> <>, <= and >= tests for consistency.  IEEE comparisons would then have to
> be
> provided as separate primitives.  This preserves the implication
> x == y ==> x = y.  But the machine code generated for =, <>, <= and >=
> over floats will have to be a lot less efficient than it is now, since
> all processors implement float comparisons as per IEEE.
>
> Coming back to your proposed workaround:
>
>> # let raw_min = min
>> val raw_min : 'a -> 'a -> 'a = <fun>
>> # let min x y =
>>   if not (y = y) then y
>>   else if not (x = x) then x
>>   else raw_min x y
>> ;;
>
> A way to make this work would be to replace the "not (x = x)" tests
> by calls to the following function (of type 'a -> bool):
>
> let is_obj_nan x =
>   Obj.tag (Obj.repr x) = Obj.double_tag &&
>   (let f = (Obj.magic x : float) in not (f = f))
>
> Not pretty, I agree.
>
> - Xavier Leroy
>
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