How do I get IEEE infinity?

[Steve Chapel]

It mathematics, division by 0 is undefined, not infinity (infinity is
not large enough).

Yes, I understand that 1/0 is undefined in the real numbers.

However, in IEEE arithmetic, there is +0.0 which represents both 0 and
positive numbers that are too small to be represented with any
precision. in IEEE floating point, +1.0/+0.0 is +infinity. In most
programming environments, 1.0/0.0 is +infinity. That's what I would have
expected in Perl.

 

[Steve Chapel]

I want to use the IEEE floating point value +Infinity in Perl.

Sorry to open this can of worms again, but now I find that it would be
convenient in my Perl program to have a floating point number that
represents NaN (not a number), which is used to represent the result of
expressions such as 0/0 and sqrt(-1). Math::BigFloat has a way to
represent NaN, but is there a way to do it in native Perl?

 

[Ilya Zakharevich]

[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Steve Chapel

Sorry to open this can of worms again, but now I find that it would be
convenient in my Perl program to have a floating point number that
represents NaN (not a number), which is used to represent the result of
expressions such as 0/0 and sqrt(-1). Math::BigFloat has a way to
represent NaN, but is there a way to do it in native Perl?

Proceed as adviced before:

~->perl -wle "print exp 1e1000000"
Infinity
~->perl -wle "print sin exp 1e1000000"
NaN

Hope this helps,
Ilya