And John Chambers writes: > I tried a little harder, and apparently the guess is wrong. It seems > that pow(0, -0) is 1 in C. Would seem better to either have pow(0,0) > and pow(0,-0) both be NaN or else 1 and Inf, but ...
There are slides from Jim Thomas summarizing the C99 choices for elementary functions at http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/meeting-materials/2001-07-18-c99.pdf or in an html version in the meeting notes at http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/meeting-minutes/01-07-18.html IIRC, pow(x, +/- 0) is taken to be 1 for all x because pow(x, 0) = 1 and pow(x, -0) = 1/pow(x, 0) = 1/1 = 1 for all finite, numerical, non-zero x. The NCEG folks spent a huge effort considering mathematical reasons and actual applications when they chose the special case values. Disagreements over special cases are natural, alas, but they did the best anyone really could. Jason ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
