Eliot Miranda wrote:
> I used to think the same (at least for infinity & infinitessimal) but no 
> longer..  1 / 0 ~= (Float maxVal * 2).  At first the IEEE rules may seem 
> counter-intuitive but they have been well thoguht-out.  They provide 
> safety for computations that go out of range.  Correctness (in this case 
> lack of false positives) is much more important than "naturalness".

I agree. But correctness can also mean that neither 1 / 0 nor Float 
maxVal * 2 should be allowed to successfully execute primitively.

> The experience with VisualWorks where we changed over to IEEE (with Inf 
> & NaN) was rthat those people who really cared avbout float arithmetic 
> and knew what they were talking about really wanted IEEE behaviour and 
> did not at all want abstract Infinity Infinitessimal or NaN.  One thing 
> they wanted was easy interoperability (e.g. with high-performance 
> libraries), which means sticking to IEEE.  Introducing abstract 
> Infinity/Infinitessimal/NaN complicates the glue and slows it down.

Interesting data point. I'm really torn in this area - it seems like 
such a broken behavior to have a ~= a.

Cheers,
   - Andreas