Re: gawk infinity issues

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 02:53:33PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> POSIX doesn't say what should happen with infinities or NaNs, so Awk
> can do as it pleases.
> 
> The C99 Standard says that printf can print either "inf" or
> "infinity"; it's implementation-defined.  Similarly, NaNs are printed
> as either "nan" or "nan(n-char-sequence)".  In either case, "-" is
> prepended if the sign bit is negative.
> 
> Presumably Awk should do the same as C99.  However, I don't think it's
> a big deal if Awk does something different on old-fashioned hosts like
> Solaris 8 that don't have proper C99 support.

Understood.  But it still seems to me that gawk should have a clear policy
(even if not defined by POSIX) on how it will convert to a number a string
that contains a (platform-dependent) representation of Infinity or NaN.  
Or do you feel that this behavior need not be nailed down?

Regards,
Andy