V3 PATCH: numeric_limits<> support, fix PR/3865

[Zack Weinberg]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 12:39:40PM -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> >>I suppose we could define "snan" (case insensitive) to do what we
> >>want.  I'd bet that Uli would be willing to pick this up for glibc's 
> >>strtod implementation.  We'd probably be "inconsistent" with other
> >>libcs, but in an extremely minor way.
> >
> >
> >It might make sense to permit entry of infinity and NaN as hexadecimal
> >floating constants.  I could go two ways on that:
> 
> That would be good but we have a standard way of writing this for nans. 
>  I'd rather see this mathod extended:
> 
>   __builtin_nan ("...")
>   __builtin_qnan ("...")
>   __builtin_snan ("...")
>   __builtin_inf ()
> 
> This has the benefit of never going to clash with additions which might 
> be added to ISO C or C++.

And would also be easier to implement (the string->float code is
rather fragile).  I like this idea.

zw