GCL & float overflow



Barton Willis wrote:
> Correct me if I'm (once again) mistaken, but I think GCL has some problems 
> with floating point 
> overflow. With Clozure CL 1.3
>
>  (%i3) safe_float(x) := block([y : errcatch(float(x))], if y = [] then 
> bfloat(x) else first(y))$
>  (%i4) safe_float(4.5b731);
>
>  float: floating point overflow converting 4.5b731
>  (%o4) 4.5b731
>
> With GCL 2.6.8:
>
>  (%i18) safe_float(4.5b731);
>  (%o18) 1.3924557213221603e115 
>
>   
Are you running a recent CVS version? FP2FLO is supposed to check for
overflow to handle the case that GCL doesn't signal an overflow on
scale-float.

safe_float returns 4.5b731 for me with gcl and current CVS code.

Ray