From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2009-01-10T06:22:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Behavior of 0 and 0.0...

--Apple-Mail-106--174122131
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=US-ASCII;
	format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


On Jan 9, 2009, at 3:51 PM, Raphael Clancy wrote:

> I was playing around with the basic math functions, and I had some
> questions about the way Ruby handles operations with 0 and 0.0.

I'm guessing that you are seeing IEEE floating point behavior with
the floating point operations and that there isn't a perfect analog
to that behavior with integer operations. IEEE floating
point defines  binary representations of negative and positive zero,
negative and positive infinity, and two types of NaN (not a number).
These 'numbers' aren't available when working with integers at the
machine level nor at the Ruby Fixnum or Bignum level.

Gary Wright




--Apple-Mail-106--174122131--