Re: (long) sNaNs not what they could be...
Dan, Lee, and all,
On Oct 15, 2010, at 7:17 PM, Lee Winter wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Dan Zuras Intervals
> <intervals08@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Still, some enterprising compiler writer or debugger
>> writer out there COULD do something along these lines.
>> It wouldn't buy them much but it would be interesting.
>
> What you have described is why SNaNs are not particularly useful as a
> memory initializer. But AFAICT none of the above reasons indicate
> that SNaNs are inappropriate or ineffective for constructing FP
> variables. I intend to continue offering them as a non-default
> option. Did I miss something?
I TRY, in my Matlab code, to allocate and (not) initialize arrays as
A = NaN * ones(...);
especially when I will be filling in A by chunks. The practice has made obvious errors in logic more times than I should admit :-)
I had thought that was a reasonable thing to do. Now I have a much better idea WHY.
Dr. George F. Corliss
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Marquette University
P.O. Box 1881
1515 W. Wisconsin Ave
Milwaukee WI 53201-1881 USA
414-288-6599; GasDay: 288-4400; Fax 288-5579
George.Corliss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.eng.mu.edu/corlissg