In a nutshell then ... what is it that inspired this notion that the strings "nan"/"inf" should actually become nans/infs when used numerically ? Was it something that the perl porters dreamed up all by themselves ?
It sure has been giving me some headaches lately. (Actually, it's the lack of uniformity across different operating systems that's the problem. If they all did the same thing, no matter how distasteful that "same thing" was, life would be much simpler :-)