floating point overflow for float(1/gamma(-536/3))



On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 6:42 AM, Barton Willis <willisb at unk.edu> wrote:

> By the way: with GCL Maxima 5.22.0:
>
> ?(%i190) x : float(1/gamma(-536/3));
> ?(%o190) -1..#INF00e+000*10^000E+6924912

I think this is a bug in EXPLODEN (should return just #INF).

> ?(%i191) is(x = x + 1);
> ?(%o191) true
> ?(%i192) 1/x;
> ?(%o192) 0.0

These two seem correct according to IEEE 754 from what I know.

> Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.6-dev-r14122M-trunk gives a Lisp error for float(1/gamma(-536/3)).

Well, it's their right to do so; CL doesn't allow for the existence
of nonnumeric floats.

best

Robert Dodier