On 2009-08-24 19:50:56 +0200, Arnold Neumaier wrote:
Michel Hack schrieb:
Nevertheless I agree that when a product of endpoints is of the
form 0*oo the indefiniteness of the limit may indeed play a role.
Arnold Neumaier however seems to have good reasons for expecting
0*oo = 0 in this case too.
which are spelled out in Part 7 of the Vienna Proposal.
If I understand correctly, this would be a useful property of
FP arithmetic which would be nice to have in order to implement
interval arithmetic efficiently (but this is not an operation
in IA). However more generally in FP, a NaN result would be
more useful for the user (because of indeterminate forms), and
it is the only conforming result for IEEE 754.
This would just mean that if a processor wants IA to be implemented
more efficiently, it could have some (preferably static) attribute
to return either NaN or 0.