No IEEE rationale, the standard dealing with this stuff is IEEE 754 (and its revision IEEE 754r) but it only discusses things like the bit patterns for representing those values.

I recently followed the discussion on your post How to create nan/inf with interest. In Perl 6 everything will be better, but when I read A Romp Through Infinity I was a bit puzzled/confused.

In mathematics it is well defined but outside of math it seems to depend on the specific domain, i.e. you can find thousands of papers discussing infinity/NaN on IEEE. Enjoy:-)

Cheers,
dHarry

Update:
IEEE-754 References for the NaN/Inf inclined monk.

In reply to Re: nans, infs, and vomit by dHarry
in thread nans, infs, and vomit by syphilis

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