Why does python break IEEE 754 for 1.0/0.0 and 0.0/0.0?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-07-14, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:

> You may have forgotten how much richer the "plausible HW" landscape
> was at the time too.

I've probably blocked most of it out intentionally.  I seem to
have vague, repressed, memories of working on a Sperry machine
that used base 4 floating point.  And of course there was the
VAX.

> If I had to bet at the time, I would have put my money on 754
> dying out due to near-universal lack of language support, and
> incompatible HW implementations.  Most programming languages
> still have no sane 754 story, but the remarkable dominance of
> the Pentium architecture changed everything on the HW side.

As messed up as I think the IA32 architecture is, I do think
Intel got FP mostly right. :)

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