more sun and vax diffs

[John DeTreville]

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	From: gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA
	Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
	Subject: Re:  more sun and vax diffs
	Date: Sun, 19-Aug-84 00:58:24 EDT

	From:      Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA>

	It is NOT proper to print "Infinity" in a numeric field that may
	have to be read back in by another program (even if the Sun scanf()
	can convert the string back into proper internal form, which I doubt,
	the output may be shipped to another system to be input).

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It is my impression that the Sun internally uses the new IEEE standard
floating-point format (coming soon to a CPU near you).  The IEEE standard
reserves a bit-pattern for "infinity", which is returned for operations such
as 1.0/0.0 (negative infinity is returned by -1.0/0.0); infinities obey the
rules of arithmetic as well as they can.

Unfortunately, the C language makes no provision for such things: there is
no number which can be printed out for infinity that could possibly be read
in as infinity.

Does the new C standard address this problem?

Cheers,
John ("Not Infinite") DeTreville
Bell Labs, Murray Hill