This post is a specialized one that will be of interrest only to those who work with binary and/or decimal floating-point values in assembly language.
I am in the process of extending some table-generation machinery to support the use of 1) positive and negative infinities, which compare larger and smaller than other values, and 2) NaNs (Not-a-Number values), both signaling and quiet ones, which are useful, among other things, as placeholders for missing or uninitialized table elements. These special values all have defined hardware representations, and I now come to my question. Are there plans to provide mechanisms for generating these special values using the HLASM without resorting to bit-string constructions? Peter Elderon and his PL/I group have provided BIFs and the like for doing so; there is reason that something like these facilities is or will be available in C; and it would be very convenient to have a standard assembly-language facility for doing so too. John Gilmore - Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
