[Python-Dev] VAX NaN evaluations (original) (raw)

Mark Janssen dreamingforward at gmail.com
Mon Nov 4 23:14:36 CET 2013

I think I spoke to soon on my earlier reply. If you have control over the whole system, you could set policy on behalf of a whole platform (like VAX) so you can "safely" use an otherwise non-normal set of bits to designate divide by zero (a negative sign bit with the rest all zeros, for example) or other NaNs. But then you should be on IEEE floating point committee and make these universal for the particular platform in question.

Despite the debate from another thread, there's probably no wisdom in using other magical bit patterns (xDEADBEEF).

-- MarkJ Tacoma, Washington

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