Re: bignum branch

[Achim Gratz]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
> There's a certain tension here between people who are used to do IEEE
> compliant FP math in other languages, and the rest of us.  The former
> will want the IEEE semantics of NaNs, which is what surprised Tom; the
> latter will probably be surprised like Tom was.

The semantics of NaN have not much to do with IEEE754 and a lot with how
you do error handling, which shouldn't be a surprise to any programmer.

> I don't see how we can fix this dilemma better than we already did,
> with making sure eql compares NaNs as equal.  I do think we should
> document the special behavior of NaNs, because many Emacs users will
> not be aware of these subtleties.

Again, comparing the representations of an NaN (binary or otherwise) is
fair game.  The NaN itself, as long as it propagates through a chain of
numerical computations, needs to be preserved; otherwise it'd be an
exercise in futility to produce them in the first place.  If you don't
want to deal with NaN at all, there are other methods of handling
numerical domain errors, but they are usually worse (and often much more
so) than the alternative.


Regards,
Achim.
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