Re: [HACKERS] [BUGS] BUG #2846: inconsistent and

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
>> OK, are you saying that there is a signal we are ignoring for
>> overflow/underflow, or that we should just silently overflow/underflow
>> and not throw an error?
>
> Silent underflow is fine with me; it's the norm in most all float
> implementations and won't surprise anyone. For overflow I'm OK with
> either returning infinity or throwing an error --- but if an error,
> it should only be about inf-out-with-non-inf-in, not comparisons to any
> artificial MAX/MIN values.
>
> Anyone else have an opinion about this?
If an underflow is not reported (And thus silently treated as zero), then
it'd make sense for me to deal with overflows in a similar way, and just
return infinity.

The most correct solution would IMHO be to provide a guc variable
"strict_float_semantics" that defaults to "off", meaning that neather
overflow nor underflow reports an error. If the variable was set to on,
_both_ overflow and underflow would be reported.

Just my €0.02

greetings, Florian Pflug