Re: [Caml-list] Catching exceptions into strings

[Ken Rose <kenarose@earthlink.net>]

Xavier Leroy wrote:

> > I tried this with java and was interested to find that integer
> > division by zero is caught but floating point division by zero isn't.
> 
> It is "caught" not as an exception, but by returning the appropriate
> values defined for this very purpose in IEEE arithmetic:
>      1.0 / 0.0 = +Inf   -1.0 / 0.0 = -Inf   0.0 / 0.0 = NaN
> This might not seem natural to you, but it's the result of years of
> arguing among numerical experts, and is the standard towards which
> both hardware and programming languages converge.

I'm shooting from the hip here, having not even looked in the manual,
but a good compromise might be some NaN-to-exception functions that are
identity operations if the parameter is a regular number, but that raise
exceptions if it's )for example) an infinity, or a NaN, or denormal, or
perhaps others.

 - ken
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