On Mar 1, 2005, at 2:13 PM, Austin Schutz wrote:
I don't disagree with the math issues regarding there not being
a definable value, but in practice the interpreter throwing an exception
has been a much greater problem for me than having a piece of errant data such
as a NaN which will generally cause detectable errors later. Often (always,
in my experience) they are errors which would be trapped by error detecting
code which isn't expecting exceptions.
My sense is that this would make the errors harder to track down, because they wouldn't manifest themselves until later. The old debate between throwing exceptions immediately and letting themselves manifest later.
Ideally, a 'nan' would carry information (i.e. a stacktrace) about when & where it was created, so you could have the best of both worlds. Maybe keep that in mind when you're meditating on it. =)
-Ken
