How to describe this bug?

[Tyson Whitehead]

On July 10, 2012 09:28:27 Christian Maeder wrote:
> Am 10.07.2012 13:06, schrieb Sönke Hahn:
> > I've attached the code. The code does not make direct use of
> > unsafePerformIO. It uses QuickCheck, but I don't think, this is a
> > QuickCheck bug. The used Eq-instance is the one for Float.
> 
> The Eq-instance for floats is broken wrt NaN
> 
> Prelude> (0/0 :: Float) == 0/0
> False
> 
> I do not know if you create NaN in your tests, though.

Would that really be broken though?  NaN can arrise from many contexts (e.g., 
sqrt(-1)), so it would also not make much sense to return True.

The IEEE standard actually defines a mutually exclusive fourth "unordered" 
state wrt to NaNs for comparisons (in addition to lesser, greater, and equal).

I would like to suggest native floating point might be better modelled as 
"Maybe Float", with NaN being the builtin "Nothing", but leaves out Inf.

Cheers!  -Tyson