Re: gawk infinity issues

[Paul Eggert]

"Andrew J. Schorr" <address@hidden> writes:

> How do you establish what is "historical practice"?

It depends on the context, but here I am referring to the way awk
behaved before people started futzing with strtod.  1979, say.

> You make it sound as if gawk has
> historically and consistently converted these strings to a numeric value of 0,

Yes, it did that originally.

I agree with all your other points.  I would prefer that Gawk treat
numbers the way that C strtod and printf does.  (Not only inf and nan,
but also nan(...), and (hold on to your hat) hexadecimal numbers.)  I
don't think Gawk should be second-guessing C.

But this is a controversial matter, and not everyone agrees, which is
why I mentioned historical practice.