On 2 April 2010 14:31, DE <satan66613@yandex.ru> wrote:
i can not imagine any circumstances under which this stuff would be useful can you?
In crypto and compression a non-finite result is never useful, so people writing in those domains would probably use what I call a finite_xint that throws instead of generating such special values. For a fixed-point numeric application, though, it's plausible that the person would rather get out any information that does calculate properly, and just be able to know at the end whether the result is precise or not. Certainly people wanting them to replace current floating-point code would likely rather have them act like the floating point values did, and not throw exceptions, which means defining reasonable semantics for operations on special values.