Re: handling NaN

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Aug-2002, Paul Kienzle <address@hidden> wrote:

| It might work better to do the following:  Use NaN for missing values and
| treat it appropriately in the stats functions as Alois is doing, but make
| use of the ieeefp invalid operation sticky bit.  Every time octave returns
| to the command line it could test and report that sticky bit was set and
| clear it before the next command.  That way the user will always be
| informed of an unexpected NaN, and expected NaNs are ignored.  Note that we
| will also need functions to test and clear the sticky bit within our
| scripts so that the user is not notified about NaNs we have already
| accounted for.

I think I'd rather have a specific NA value.  But it would also be
useful to have Octave be more IEEE FP aware, so that users can
explicitly say what they want to have happen when exceptions occur,
set rounding modes, etc.

jwe



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