strtod ("nan") returns negative NaN

[Eric Blake]

On 08/14/2018 04:31 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

>> The C standard disagrees with you [ISO:IEC 9899:2011, section 5.2.4.2.2]:
>>
>> "An implementation may give zero and values that are not floating-point
>> numbers (such as infinities and NaNs) a sign or may leave them unsigned.
>> Wherever such values are unsigned, any requirement in this International
>> Standard to retrieve the sign shall produce an unspecified sign, and any
>> requirement to set the sign shall be ignored."
>>
> 
> Does it disagree? I would say it did if it said MUST.. but it says MAY
> I thought usually meant "be consistent with what you think is right
> for your environment but yeah whatever".

Read conversely, if the implementation lets NaN have a sign (which 
Cygwin does), then retrieving and setting the sign is defined.

> 
>   And one can read the "any requirement to set the sign shall be
> ignored" as being -NaN should come back as NaN. I don't know how this
> is also affected by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_10967 which
> goes to the IEEE 754 NaN is not a number (except when it is). [
> 
> It looks from my layman point of view that Cygwin is ok with sending
> whatever they want back if it is implementation defined. However the
> bigger case is whether they want to be similar to how the other
> environments report things. Currently Cygwin reports -NaN for positive
> NaN and 'NaN' for '-NaN'.. which may be ok but doesn't match the other
> environments which all report NaN. [Does that make sense?]

Cygwin is indeed buggy for turning "NaN" into -NaN; that's easy enough 
to fix. The remaining question is whether it should turn "-NaN" into 
-NaN; and the argument that glibc JUST fixed their bug 23007 to make 
strtod("-nan") return -NaN means that Cygwin should, indeed, preserve 
the negative sign bit when parsing "-nan".

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23007

So, the desired behavior:

strtod("nan") -> NaN
strtod("-nan") -> -NaN
printf("%f", NaN) -> "NaN"
printf("%f", -NaN) -> "-NaN"

and similarly for float and long double.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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