you could start with a couple of IV's and generate a NaN.

The problem (for me) is that there are no IVs involved in your construction.

The basic compile-time constant: 2**1025 never results in the construction of any IVs.

The interpreter constructs a compile-time constant from the expression and stores it as an NV:

Perl> use Devel::Peek;;
Perl> $x = 2**1025;;
Perl> Dump( $x );;
SV = NV(0xb4598) at 0x3d73ee8
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (NOK,pNOK)
  NV = 1.#INF

[download]

And then at runtime, one NV (value 1.#INF) is divided by another NV (also 1.#INF) and the results is an NV (value: -1.#IND):

$y = $x / $x;;
Dump $y;;
SV = NV(0xb45a0) at 0x3d6c6a8
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (NOK,pNOK)
  NV = -1.#IND

[download]

No IVs were ever involved because the textual integer expression from the source code never made into the byte-coded Perl.

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In reply to Re^10: NaN output by BrowserUk
in thread NaN output by spikeinc

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