Floating Point Unit Support

This chapter lists features to configure the “Floating Point Unit” of your machine. The exact behaviour of your Floating Point Unit can’t be discussed here in general — its just machine type dependent.

set_modeint precision, int rounding, int exception_mask the mode has effect on the behaviour during calcualtion, e.g. division by zero or rounding.

The following constants are used as precision argument:

l|lconstantmode valuedefinition via gsl

Possible round arguments are:

l|lconstantmode valuedefinition via gsl

These exception arguments can be added. is the sum of all 5 constants.

l|lconstantmode valuedefinition via gsl

env_setup sets the ieee mode from . This is not called any more automatically when importing the .

bin_reprfloat value returns the binary representation as tuple with the following contents: These values are used as in :

l|lconstanttype valuedefinition via gsl

isnanfloat value determines if the argument is not a valid number

nan generates a “not-a-number” value. This is implemented as function, because of the potential exception generation by your floating-point unit.

isinffloat value returns -1 if the argument represents a negative infinite value and +1 if positive, 0 otherwise

posinf gives you the representation of “positive infinity”

neginf the same as posinf, but negative

finitefloat value results in 1 if the value is finite, 0 if it is not a number or infinite