Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
NaN
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
=== Signaling NaN === Signaling NaNs, or sNaNs, are special forms of a NaN that, when consumed by most operations, should raise the invalid operation exception and then, if appropriate, be "quieted" into a qNaN that may then propagate. They were introduced in [[IEEE 754]]. There have been several ideas for how these might be used: * Filling uninitialized memory with signaling NaNs would produce the invalid operation exception if the data is used before it is initialized * Using an sNaN as a placeholder for a more complicated [[object (computer science)|object]], such as: ** A representation of a number that has [[arithmetic underflow|underflowed]] ** A representation of a number that has [[arithmetic overflow|overflowed]] ** Number in a higher precision format ** A [[complex number]] When encountered, a trap handler could decode the sNaN and return an index to the computed result. In practice, this approach is faced with many complications. The treatment of the [[sign bit]] of NaNs for some simple operations (such as [[absolute value]]) is different from that for arithmetic operations. Traps are not required by the standard.{{cn|date=September 2024}}
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)