Piers Cawley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] on 9 October 2001 09:02 wrote:
> But there are going to be problems in some cases if we change the
> behaviour of NaN to the perl semantics. There are cases where the IEEE
> behaviour is *useful* dammit.
Indeed, we certainly don't want sqrt(-1) == sqrt(-2) being true.
> The problem here is that you can't simply do:
>
> ...
> until $inflation;
>
> Because 0 isn't true.
>
> Hmmm... just had a thought. How does this sound:
>
> +'non_numeric_string' becomes 'NaN is undefined'
>
> sqrt(-1) becomes 'NaN is defined'
>
>
> Then, if you're doing loop control you'd do
>
> ...
> until defined(+$inflation)
>
> And when you're doing numeric calculation type stuff you get the
> useful IEEE behaviour.
>
> Why do I have the horrible feeling that *nobody* is going to like this
> proposal...
>
<randomish thoughts about this...>
I think this is the right track but not necessarily the right "values"...
What I would like is to be able to have different results from (ignoring any
inbuilt support for complex numbers that may have been proposed):
$x = sqrt(-2); # $x is now one form of NaN
$x += 1; # $x should still be NaN
verses
$y = +"a string"; # $x is another form of NaN such that
$y += 1; # now $y is 1.
Which would lead to something like:
$y = +"a string";
leading to $y being "NaN is undef"
While
$y = sqrt(-1);
leading to $y being "NaN is NaN".
And thus in either case $y.IsNum being false while further arithmetic could
preceed in the expected manner (most tools seem to largely treat
string->number as 0 where string doesn't start with a digit) which is often
useful behavior. While making is easy to check whether you really had a
number.
Alternatively, perhaps this is actually the wrong approach, and both should
simple by NaN, but the initial usage is in error:
Damian Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrotes:
> print "Inflation rate: " and $inflation = +<>
> until $inflation != NaN;
I think this is putting the cart before the horse... you're getting a number
and then asking if it was a number... a little rewrite:
print "Inflation rate: " and $inflation = +<>
until $inflation.IsNum
should be easier to understand (and allows IEEE semantics for NaN which do
make sense but are not terribly clear to the un-initiated in tri-valued
logic) as well as avoiding the double-negative.
Richard Cox
Senior Software Developer
Dell Technology Online
All opinions and statements mine and do not in any way (unless expressly
stated) imply anything at all on behalf of my employer
