From: "Yaron Minsky" <yminsky@cs.cornell.edu>
To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Weird behavior with nan's and min/max
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:52:14 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <63219.141.155.88.179.1066164734.squirrel@minsky-primus.homeip.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <54490.141.155.88.179.1066143413.squirrel@minsky-primus.homeip.net>
I've gotten a bunch of replies on this, some pointing out that the proper
result could be achieved with various methods for detecting nan's
explicitly. This kind of misses my point, which is that this leads to
some pretty serious violations of the principle of least surprise.
The first is that adding a type annotation to a function can change its
semantics: the specialized min function I came up with works
substantively differently depending on whether it's known at compile-time
that it operates only on floats.
The second weirdness is the breaking of (==) => (=), since "nan == nan"
evaluates to true and "nan = nan" evaluates to false.
These are pretty weird and unpleasant surprises, and now that I've been
bitten by them I'm eager to avoid them in the future. Hence my desire for
a polymorphic equality function that doesn't change it's behavior when
applied to floats.
y
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2003-10-14 20:52 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2003-10-14 14:37 Yaron Minsky
2003-10-14 14:56 ` Yaron Minsky
2003-10-14 20:52 ` Yaron Minsky [this message]
2003-10-14 23:43 ` skaller
2003-10-16 17:29 ` Hendrik Tews
2003-10-16 13:16 ` Xavier Leroy
2003-10-16 14:01 ` Yaron Minsky
2003-10-17 9:26 ` [Caml-list] Test nan (was: Weird behavior with nan's and min/max) Christophe TROESTLER
2003-10-16 21:40 ` [Caml-list] Weird behavior with nan's and min/max Yaron Minsky
2003-10-16 21:50 ` Yaron Minsky
2003-10-16 22:52 ` Damien Doligez
2003-10-17 14:55 ` skaller
2003-10-17 15:14 ` Floating point exceptions (Was Re: [Caml-list] Weird behavior with nan's and min/max) Yaron Minsky
2003-10-17 23:55 ` [Caml-list] Weird behavior with nan's and min/max Yaron M. Minsky
2003-10-20 13:29 ` Xavier Leroy
2003-10-20 13:43 ` Yaron Minsky
2003-10-20 14:24 ` Xavier Leroy
2003-10-16 23:55 ` [Caml-list] " Jed Davis
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