Proposed standard python module: ieee754

[Martin v. Löwis]

"Warnes, Gregory R" <gregory_r_warnes at groton.pfizer.com> writes:

> Not at all.  As it stands now, most common platforms have IEEE 754 compliant
> hardware, unfortunately, the C library routines are inconsistent in how and
> whether they deal with these special values.   

It's worse than that: The hardware is usually *not* (strictly) IEEE 754
compliant, and even if it is, it is inconsistent across platforms in
being so. IEEE supports different rounding modes and exception modes
(this is probably wrong terminology), so whether computations give INF
or an exception is vendor-defined (either is IEEE 754 compliant).

Regards,
Martin