NaN is a purely floating point concept

It occurs to me that there is indeed a way (in perl) to generate a NaN using only integer values: 
C:\>perl -le "$x = (2**1025) / (2**1025);print $x;"
-1.#IND

[download]
(For those unfamiliar with MS Windows notation, -1.#IND is one of the ways that it represents a NaN)

This, of course, doesn't contradict anything you've said. And it would take some clever legalese to show that this example proves that NaN *can* result from integer overflow ;-)

But it might count as a "trick" method of generating a NaN in perl using only integer values.
NOTE: If your perl's NV is a long double, then 1025 probably won't be a large enough power to generate the NaN.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^5: NaN output by syphilis
in thread NaN output by spikeinc

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