Re: [xml] XPath Infinities

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Bjorn Reese wrote:

> > Do you really think that just blinding ignoring Floating point exceptions is
> > a good idea?
>
> I _know_ that it is a good idea. NaN and Inf depends both on hardware, OS,
> and compiler support, so you will typically experience different behaviour
> on different platforms/compilers.
>
> If you use GCC on Alpha, then 0/0 will normally result in a core dump.
> If you supply your own signal handler for SIGFPE, then it returns 0
> (or some arbitrary value). If you ignore the signal handler, then it
> returns NaN, which is the desired output.
>
> So, you have to ignore SIGFPE on Alpha using GCC.

Somebody decided to have an overly bright idea of tieing fp mode with the
way you set SIGFPE handling. gosh.

[snip]

> With C99 compilers there is a NAN macro which can be used instead.

The problem here is the lack of consistent and true C99 support.

> > Or are you saying that the bug still existed on OSF?
>
> With the native C compiler, yes.

not using -ieee should not be supported. Among other things, you don't
even have denormals that way, instead they are flushed to zero.

        Sander

One day a tortoise will learn to fly
        -- Terry Pratchett, 'Small Gods'