Proposal: New Eq and Ord instances for Double and Float

[Edward Kmett]

A proposal that made signaling NaN the default is something I could get behind.

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 26, 2011, at 9:57 AM, "Roman Leshchinskiy" <rl at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

> Paterson, Ross wrote:
>> Roman Leshchinskiy writes:
>>> Daniel Fischer wrote:
>>>> Proposal: Provide Double and Float with Eq and Ord instances that
>>>> introduce a total order.
>>> 
>>> I'm strongly against this, for the reasons that have already been
>>> mentioned.   and because there a good reasons for why the IEEE semantics
>>> is the way it is.
>> 
>> But compare cannot implement the IEEE semantics and be total, because
>> the Ordering type cannot represent "unordered".  Something has to give.
>> The nearest compare can do is to throw an exception if an argument is
>> NaN (with compatible behaviour from the comparison operators).
> 
> Why can't compare just specify that its results are undefined when applied
> to NaN? As a matter of fact, the Haskell report already does this. It
> explicitly says that the results of evaluating expressions like 0/0 are
> undefined which means that applying compare to them produces undefined
> results as well.
> 
>> At least that would not be silent or subtle breakage.
> 
> IMO, if we really want to avoid silent breakage we shouldn't have silent
> NaNs by default. That is, evaluating 0/0 should throw an exception. Unless
> I'm mistaken, this can be implemented by simply setting the appropriate
> processor flag. Personally, I would be much more open to a proposal to
> make this the default as long as there is no runtime cost and silent NaNs
> can be turned back on somehow if a program needs them.
> 
> Roman
> 
> 
> 
> 
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