From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2010-08-11T10:16:57+09:00
Subject: Re: "NaN".to_f revisited

Hi,

In message "Re: "NaN".to_f revisited"
    on Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:30:14 +0900, Ryo <furue@hawaii.edu> writes:

|I thought ".to_s.to_f" should be an identity operation on any floating
|point number, apart from a potential truncation error.

That would be a good property.  The reason behind String#to_f not
supporting NaN and Inf is that I couldn't give up non IEEE754 floating
point architecture such as VAX at the time I implemented. 

But we are no longer see any non-IEEE754 architecture around, and
current implementation of Ruby would require IEEE754 anyway, so it
might be a good chance to introduce roundtrip nature.

							matz.