On Jan 9, 2009, at 4:22 PM, Gary Wright wrote:

>
> On Jan 9, 2009, at 3:51 PM, Raphael Clancy wrote:
>
>> I was playing around with the basic math functions, and I had some
>> questions about the way Ruby handles operations with 0 and 0.0.
>
> I'm guessing that you are seeing IEEE floating point behavior with
> the floating point operations and that there isn't a perfect analog
> to that behavior with integer operations. IEEE floating
> point defines  binary representations of negative and positive zero,
> negative and positive infinity, and two types of NaN (not a number).
> These 'numbers' aren't available when working with integers at the
> machine level nor at the Ruby Fixnum or Bignum level.
>
> Gary Wright

In particular, look at how IEEE defines operations such as 0.0/0.0

   http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/coding/ieeefloat.html

-Rob

Rob Biedenharn		http://agileconsultingllc.com
Rob / AgileConsultingLLC.com