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Re: external representations

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On Jun 23, 2005, at 11:25 PM, William D Clinger wrote:

Interesting.  Can you tell me of any hardware that actually
does this?

Offhand, no.

This is why I believe, however, that NaNs that can be used as inputs to or can be results of floating-point processing should have external representations. If you want to define other objects that cannot arise as outputs or inputs to floating-point operations that otherwise have the form of a NaN (maximum exponent, nonzero mantissa), then I don't think these things should be called NaNs, precisely, and I don't think that they need external representations.

Brad