On Wed, Apr 26, 2000 at 11:03:45AM -0500, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Apr 26), Sheldon Hearn said:
> > On Tue, 25 Apr 2000 00:05:23 MST, Brooks Davis wrote:
> > > > Is FreeBSD's behavior correct? Why or why not? You can use the
> > > > included code snippet to verify that this occurs.
> > >
> > > FreeBSD has traditionaly violated the IEEE FP standard in this
> > > regard. This is fixed in 5.0 and I think in 4.0-STABLE (though I
> > > can't remember what file this is in so I can't check.)
> >
> > Huh? I'm pretty sure you've got this backwards. FreeBSD has
> > traditionally upheld the standard and we only recently decided to go
> > with the flow in 5.0.
>
> No; we held our moral ground against IEEE, until 5.0 when we gave in.
> The IEEE standard says "trap nothing". For most programs, this is the
> wrong thing to do, since they are not signal-processing apps or
> numerical analysis programs and a divide by zero is a coding error.
> I'd rather have my program die on an unexpected divide by zero than
> continue with invalid data.
>
> Why should we treat (1.0/0.0) any differently from (1/0)?
Because 0.0 might be the closest approximation to whatever
number you were really trying to divide by that the hardware can
manage. 0 is never an approximation to 1 or -1.
Dividing is for wimps, anyway. :-)
--
Andrew
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