haskell-request
1 Nov 91 15:06
Original-Via: uk.ac.ed.mrcvax; Fri, 1 Nov 91 14:00:30 GMT > | Which leads me to one final comment. Does the Report say anywhere that > | an overflow gives rise to an undefined result? > > Yes it does (though you may not like the answer!). See Section 6.8.1, p56. > > Simon The relevant sentence states: "The results of exception conditions (such as overflow or underflow) on the fixed-precision numeric types are undefined; and implementations may choose error (bottom, semantically), a truncated value, or a special value such as infinity, indefinite, etc" Surely this is unacceptable? It is unavoidable that a program might run on one implementation and fail on another, but is it not a basic principle of the language that two implementations will deliver identical results if they deliver results at all? Ian