Signaling NaN Material for Rationale by Fred Tydeman N919 August 4, 2000 The following was adopted from NCEG 91-028 (Floating-Point C Extensions), the last NCEG document to discuss support for Signaling NaNs. The following should be added to the Rationale as a new annex. Annex B(?) Support for Signaling NaNs IEC-60559 (International version of IEEE-754) requires two kinds of NaNs: Quiet NaNs and Signaling NaNs. Standard C only adopted Quiet NaNs. It did not adopt Signaling NaNs because it was believed that they are of too limited utility for the amount of work required. But, for implementations that do wish to support Signaling NaNs, it is highly recommended that they be supported in the following manner (to promote consistency in implementations and portability among applications). 5.2.4.2.2 Characteristics of floating types Floating types may support not only numeric values, finite and possibly infinite, but also NaN (Not-a-Number) values, which do not represent numbers. A NaN that generally raises an exception when encountered as an operand of arithmetic operations, is called a signaling NaN; the operation is said to trigger the signaling NaN. A NaN that behaves predictably and does not raise exceptions in arithmetic operations is called a quiet NaN. The IEEE floating-point standards specify quiet and signaling NaNs, but this document applies the general terms for non-IEEE implementations as well-for example, the VAX reserved operand and the CDC and CRAY indefinite qualify as signaling NaNs. In IEEE standard arithmetic, operations that trigger a signaling NaN argument generally return a quiet NaN result provided no trap is taken. The primary utility of quiet NaNs-"to handle otherwise intractable situations, such as providing a default value for 0.0/0.0" -can be well supported through straightforward extensions to C. Other applications of NaNs may prove useful. Available parts of NaNs have been used to encode auxiliary information, for example about the NaN's origin. Signaling NaNs are good candidates for filling uninitialized storage; and their available parts could distinguish uninitialized floating objects. IEEE signaling NaNs and trap handlers potentially provide hooks for maintaining diagnostic information or for implementing special arithmetics. However, C support for signaling NaNs, or for auxiliary information that could be encoded in NaNs, is problematic. Implementation mechanisms may trigger signaling NaNs, or fail to, in mysterious ways. The IEEE floating-point standards require that NaNs propagate, but not all implementations faithfully propagate the entire contents. And even the IEEE standards fail to specify the contents of NaNs through format conversion, which is pervasive in some C implementation mechanisms. Whether an operation that merely returns the value of a numeric operand, changing at most its sign, triggers signaling NaNs is unspecified. Such operations include conversions that do not change precision, the unary + and - operators, and the fabs and copysign functions. Leaving the semantics unspecified allows more efficient implementation. The IEEE floating-point standards explicitly give the option to implement same-precision conversions by either arithmetic operations or data moves, which is important because of the frequency of such conversions in parameter passing and assignments. 7.12 Mathematics The number classification macros are augmented with FP_NANS which expands to an integer constant expression with value distinct from all the other number classification macros. FP_NANS is used to classify Signaling NaNs. FP_NAN is used to classify Quiet NaNs. Results for the inquiry macros specified in the remainder of this section should not trigger signaling NaNs. 7.12.11.x The nans functions Synopsis #include double nans(const char *tagp); float nansf(const char *tagp); long double nansl(const char *tagp); Description An implementation declares a nans function if and only if it supports signaling NaNs in the type of the function. The call nans("n-char-sequence") is equivalent to strtod("NANS(n-char-sequence)", (char**) NULL). Similarly nansf and nansl are defined in terms of strtof and strtold. If tagp does not point to an n-char-sequence string then the result NaN's content is indeterminate. Returns The nans functions return a signaling NaN with content indicated through tagp, provided they don't trigger it first. 7.19.6.1 The fprintf function For a signaling NaN value, the implementation has the options to trigger the signaling NaN or to converted in one of the styles [-]nans or [-]nans(n-char- sequence)-which style, and the interpretation of any n-char-sequence, is implementation-defined. Use of an upper case format specifier, E, F, or G, results in INF, INFINITY, NAN, or NANS instead of inf, infinity, nan, or nans. 7.19.6.2 The fscanf function All valid syntax-including infinity, NaN, and signed zero-is treated in the same manner as strtod. The fscanf function should not trigger a signaling NaN that it produces in response to a signaling NaN input string. By not triggering signaling NaNs, fscanf provides a way of setting signaling NaN values. This might appear to be in conflict with the IEEE floating-point standards which require that binary-decimal conversion trigger signaling NaN input; however, the conversion of NANS input need not be regarded as decimal-to-binary conversion. 7.20.1.3 The strtod, strtof, and strtold functions The syntax accepted by strtod is augmented to include: sign-opt NANS sign-opt NANS(n-char-sequence-opt) Strings of the form NANS or NANS(n-char-sequence-opt) produce signaling NaNs, if supported, else are treated as invalid input. If a signaling NaN is produced the implementation has the option of returning it or triggering it. An implementation may use the n-char-sequence to determine extra information to be represented in the NaN's significand; which n-char-sequence's are meaningful is implementation-defined. The option to trigger a signaling NaN is needed by implementations whose function-return mechanism involves conversion between different formats, which may trigger the signaling NaN. For example, an implementation that returns functions' results in a wider-than-float register might not be able to return a signaling NaN result for strtof. Although SNAN would have been a more suggestive representation for signaling NaNs, NANS was chosen instead because it lessens the likelihood of consuming non-numeric input, and because IEEE standard 854 says that string representations of NaNs should begin with "NAN". For quiet NaNs, NAN was chosen over NANQ for brevity and because the predominance of NaNs in I/O are expected to be quiet. In addition, the wide character version of the I/O functions should be argmented to support Signaling NaNs in the same manner as the narrow character I/O functions.