I haven't been following this, since I've been on
vacation,
but the claim that a system uses IEEE floats for
representation
is a far cry from actually supporting the
operations. A system that
always provokes an error on division by zero instead
of producing
an infinity is NOT conforming to IEEE operations.
RJF
----- Original Message -----
From: Raymond Toy
Date: Thursday, June 23, 2005 9:52 am
Subject: Re: [Maxima] error - system too complex
> >>>>> "Robert" == Robert Dodier
writes:
>
> Robert> --- Nikodemus Siivola
wrote:
> >> Indeed, ANSI CL specifies
:IEEE-FLOATING-POINT in *FEATURES* to
> >> indicate that the implementation purports to
conform to the
> >> requirements of IEEE Standard for Binary
Floating-Point
> Arithmetic. >> However, how what this exactly
means is rather
> vague.
> Robert> I find CMUCL and GCL both have
:IEEE-FLOATING-POINT in
> Robert> *FEATURES*, although they both barf on
computations which
> Robert> would yield not-a-number or infinity.
Clisp is honest
> enough
> If you have an example of this barfing, please
show it. By default,
> in CMUCL, things that would produce NaN or
infinity signal errors.
> But you can change that so it does return NaN or
infinity. Of course,
> all computations after that are likely to be
useless. And it's likely
> maxima doesn't know what to do with NaN or infinity.
>
> Robert> Maxima probably should try to work
around the underlying
> Robert> Lisp's prohibition of special values.
>
> Which special values? NaN and infinity? CMUCL
handles them fine.
>
> Ray
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>