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Signaling NaN


In the IEEE 754-2008 standard (referred to as IEEE 754 henceforth), a signaling NaN or sNaN is a NaN which is signaling in the sense of being most commonly returned in conjunction with various exceptions and handling mechanisms defined therefor. This is in contrast to the quiet NaN (qNaN) which rarely signals a floating-point exception of any kind (IEEE Computer Society 2008).

Within the framework documentation, it is suggested that sNaNs be implemented in such a way as to afford meaningful representations for uninitialized variables and arithmetic-like enhancements which may naturally fall beyond the scope of the standard. In particular, sNaNs are largely reserved for operands which signal exceptions for nearly every general-computational and signaling-computational operation though, in rare instances, qNaNs may also result from such contexts.


See also

Arithmetic, Biased Exponent, Floating-Point Algebra, Floating-Point Arithmetic, Floating-Point Exponent, Floating-Point Normal Number, Floating-Point Number, Floating-Point Preferred Exponent, Floating-Point Quantum, Floating-Point Representation, IEEE 754-2008, Interval Arithmetic, NaN, Quiet NaN, Significand, Subnormal Number

This entry contributed by Christopher Stover

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References

Goldberg, D. "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic." ACM Comput. Surv. 23, 5-48, March 1991. http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html.IEEE Computer Society. "IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic: IEEE Std 754-2008 (Revision of IEEE Std 754-1985)." 2008. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=4610935.

Cite this as:

Stover, Christopher. "Signaling NaN." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource, created by Eric W. Weisstein. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/SignalingNaN.html

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