I'll save space and not include previous messages.
My 2 cents: At the very least the documentation needs a fix. If it is
easy to do, then Ted Harding's suggestion of a switch (default OFF) to
check for sign difference would be sensible.
I would urge inclusion in the documentation of the +0, -0 example(s) if
there is NOT a way in R to distinguish these. There are occasions where
it is useful to be able to detect things like this (and NaN and Inf and
-Inf etc.). They are usually not of interest to users, but sometimes are
needed for developers to check edge effects. For those cases it may be
time to consider a package FPIEEE754 or some similar name to allow
testing and possibly setting of flags for some of the fancier features.
Likely used by just a few of us in extreme situations. Unfortunately,
some of the nice exception handling that was suggested in the standard
is apparently rarely implemented in compilers.
For info, I was actually a voting member of IEEE 754 because I found a
nice "feature" in the IBM Fortran G arithmetic, though I never sat in on
any of the meetings.
JN
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