From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2004-10-13T08:31:17+09:00
Subject: Re: "nan".to_f ?

Hi,

In message "Re: "nan".to_f ?"
    on Wed, 13 Oct 2004 05:22:00 +0900, Thomas Fini Hansen <beast@system-tnt.dk> writes:

|I would say that 'NaN' is a the string representation of a float, so
|logically it should be parsed to such, that's why I'm wondering why
|this behaviour was *removed*.

It's not valid string representation of a float.

 ruby -e 'nan'
 -e:1: undefined local variable or method `nan' for main:Object (NameError)

 ruby -e 'NaN'
 -e:1: uninitialized constant NaN (NameError)

Ruby used to use system's strtod(3), which gives you "nan" an "inf"
for free, but its interpretation varies a little from platform to
platform.  Now it uses its own version of strtod that interprets only
valid float representation in Ruby.

							matz.