Float bug toolkit: what the hash is this?

Maloney johnm at wdi.disney.com
Tue Feb 17 00:42:00 UTC 1998


>In any of the examples, an attempt to print an infinity seems to cause
>Squeak to run amuck. It's the printing that is causing the low memory
>condition.

Yes, I just ran across this myself. The 1.31 release includes some code
(from Tim Olson, I believe) that make Inf and NaN print correctly.
However, various other things break when they encounter these values.
For example, sending "asInteger" to Inf will cause an endless recursion.

So I agree with your statement that:

>Squeak needs to properly support IEEE floating point. As a start it should
>at least add tests for Infinity+, infinity-, NAN, and maybe gradual
>underflow.

Incidentally, do you happen to have a pointer to quick reference to the
IEEE floating point spec? Or, do you happen to know offhand the list of
special values like Inf, -Inf, and NaN? (I now know that Inf is
'7FF0000000000000' in hex.)

	-- John





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