Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> writes:
> In theory you would be right that data should be validated at the boundaries
> of the program, that is, when they are read from outside sources. But no
> program I know of does this for unconstrained floating-point numbers.
That's an interesting point. GNU PSPP reads unconstrained
"double"s from SPSS data files without validating them[*], since
it never occurred to me that this was a bad idea. A function to
validate a floating-point number would therefore be useful in
PSPP.
[*] Except in the case where it detects that the data file uses a
nonnative floating point format such as one of the old IBM or
DEC floating-point formats, in which case it does a format
conversion.
