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[Python-Dev] VAX NaN evaluations

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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