[squeak-dev] Zero is positive?

Bruce O'Neel bruce.oneel at pckswarms.ch
Sun Jul 1 08:09:14 UTC 2018


One imagines there has been bloodshed in standards meetings over things like this.  
  
For example, IEEE 754 has both positive and negative zeros.  
  
For those of you who don't feel that life is pedantic enough there are many fascinating articles.   You can start with:  
  
[https://hackernoon.com/negative-zero-bbd5fd790af3](https://hackernoon.com/negative-zero-bbd5fd790af3)  
  
and if you have way way too much time on your hands on a Sunday a C++ wg21 proposal edit from Apple.  Probably from someone who thought "Life is not complex enough, I'll volunteer for the CLANG team.  Oh, and then I'll join the standards committee as well."  
  
[http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0907r0.html](http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0907r0.html)  
  
cheers  
  
bruce  

> I was just found a bug in my code because I had written it assuming   
>  that the number 0 (zero) is neither positive nor negative.  It failed   
>  because:   
>   
>  0 positive    "true"   
>   
>  Really?   
>   
>  Ah, okay, there's #strictlyPositive, I'll use that.   
>   
>  But it seems like #nonNegative might be a better name then!
  
  

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