Negative zero makes sense as a last vestige of gradual underflow; and
anyway, it's well-behaved: it looks like 0 except when you take the log,
reciprocal, or square root. In any normal computation, it goes away.
In contrast, NaN messes up anything it touches.
I think we've had negative 0 in J forever. If NaN is a data virus, -0
is a virus that has been inserted into our DNA.
Henry Rich
On 1/16/2013 4:45 PM, Raul Miller wrote:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Henry Rich <henryhr...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
Negative zero isn't a bug, it's a feature that numerical types, especially
William Kahan, wanted to get into IEEE-754 to help out some things. I'm not
expert enough to explain.
Something similar could be said about NaN.
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