From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-05-06T04:28:36+09:00
Subject: Re: 0.0 sign


On May 5, 2004, at 10:33 AM, Elias Athanasopoulos wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I don't know if this is intentional, but is there a reason
> that 0.0 holds the sign?

IEEE 754 (floating point arithmetic standard) specifies negative zero 
for floats. For more explanation, see
http://www.obtuse.com/resources/negative_zero.html

if a mathematical result too small for your hardware to compute is 
returned, you can determine whether it was on the negative side, or the 
positive side.

   def really_complex_function(num)
     num/1_000_000_000_000_000_000.0
   end
     ==>nil
   really_complex_function(  0.000_000_000_000_000_000_1 )
     ==>0.0
   really_complex_function( -0.000_000_000_000_000_000_1 )
    ==>-0.0