Re: Re: [GENERAL] +/- Inf for float8's

On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 at 08:22:21PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>
> Hmm, I'm getting the feeling that perhaps at this point we should
> explicitly *not* support NaN at all. After all, the underlying reason for
> offering them is to provide IEEE 754 compliant floating point arithmetic,
> but if we start making compromises such as NaN == NaN or NaN > +Infinity
> then we might as well not do it. In these cases I opine that if you can't
> do something correctly then you should perhaps be honest and don't do
> it. After all, users that want a "not-a-number" can use NULL in most
> cases, and hard-core floating point users are going to fail miserably
> with the FE/BE protocol anyway.
>

Pretty much were I have come to on this, as well. The point is to get
the existing NaN to not break indicies or sorting. The simplest way is
to disable it.

Ross
--
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm(at)rice(dot)edu>
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005