From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2009-01-10T06:25:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Behavior of 0 and 0.0...

Gary Wright wrote:
> 
> 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

And just to underline the point... these behaviors are not ruby spec, 
but rather IEEE fp spec.

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407