On Sunday, 20 November 2005 at 1:50:42 -0800, Colin Percival wrote: > Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: >> On Sunday, 20 November 2005 at 0:50:30 +0000, Colin Percival wrote: >>> Log: >>> An empty file does not have a positive number of lines. >> >> Yes it does. It's 0, not -0. > > As a mathematician, I must insist that 0 = -0 and is neither > positive nor negative. :-)
Hmm, interesting. I've obviously forgotten too much mathematics. I've also almost forgotten ones'-complement machines, but I'm pretty sure that it's correct to say in computers that (+)0 is positive. On the ones'-complement machines I knew, -0 was also (usually) negative. >>> Make sure that the number of lines read is non-zero before in >>> order to avoid dumping core. >> >> This is a different (and presumably correct) test. > > The correct test is actually to verify that the number of lines > is positive, but while we cannot assume this (as I originally > did), we can assume that the number of lines is non-negative > (and all non-negative non-zero values are positive). Don't spoil a good story by sticking to facts :-) Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers _______________________________________________ cvs-all@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-all To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"