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Groups > comp.lang.c > #9713

Re: NaN

From James Kuyper <jameskuyper@verizon.net>
Newsgroups comp.lang.c
Subject Re: NaN
Date 2011-08-29 15:49 -0400
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <4E5BED55.7040400@verizon.net> (permalink)
References <4c6623c7-540f-4d4b-9e79-9594ceb2ad4f@g9g2000yqb.googlegroups.com> <4E5BB35E.2050009@verizon.net> <3ea010e8-4446-47b8-b3eb-1ba0afd9384e@c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>

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On 08/29/2011 02:27 PM, Malcolm McLean wrote:
> On Aug 29, 6:42 pm, James Kuyper <jameskuy...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> It would be more appropriate to say that a NaN indicates a special case,
>> rather than an error.
>>
> Nan's a bit like null pointer. It sounds rather specialised, but once
> you have it, you use it in all sorts of places.

I think you're using "specialized" in a different sense than I was. When
I said that a NaN indicates a special case, I was referring to the fact
that expressions which are permitted (or required, if __STDC_IEC_559__
is pre#defined by the implementation) to have a value of NaN can
generally do so only for special values of their operands: acos(2.0),
log(-1.0), pow(-1.0, 0.5), tgamma(-1.0), fmod(0.0, 0.0).

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Thread

Re: NaN HENRY Eshbaugh <henryeshbaugh@gmail.com> - 2011-08-29 05:49 -0700
  Re: NaN James Kuyper <jameskuyper@verizon.net> - 2011-08-29 11:42 -0400
    Re: NaN Malcolm McLean <malcolm.mclean5@btinternet.com> - 2011-08-29 11:27 -0700
      Re: NaN James Kuyper <jameskuyper@verizon.net> - 2011-08-29 15:49 -0400
    Re: NaN HENRY Eshbaugh <henryeshbaugh@gmail.com> - 2011-08-29 21:09 -0700
      Re: NaN Malcolm McLean <malcolm.mclean5@btinternet.com> - 2011-08-30 02:36 -0700

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