Brandon Allbery wrote: >iirc underflow doesn't work quite the way either you or Darren said; it's >not just the signed zero, it's also a status flag indicating that that >signed zero reflects an underflow condition.
There is no flag attached to a zero to indicate that it came from underflow. There is an underflow exception, which in many implementations is signalled by setting a processor status flag, but that's quite separate from the result value. (Rakudo doesn't make this status available afaics.) I was not attempting to describe the whole process of underflow; I was only describing what a floating point zero, in isolation, represents. -zefram
