Krishna Myneni wrote:
> The specification of >FLOAT in DPANS94 suggests that it treat a string
> of blanks as a representation of zero (below). Common practice among
> Forth systems (pfe, gforth, bigforth) appears to extend this suggested
> behavior to null strings as well, e.g.
>
> s" " >FLOAT
>
> returns a true flag on the stack, and fp zero on the floating point
> stack. Is there a strong argument for considering a null string to be a
> valid representation of fp zero. I would have implemented the conversion
> to return a false flag. Also, I don't much like the idea of treating a
> string of blanks as a valid representation for 0E either, but perhaps
> there was some valid reason for suggesting this behavior.
>
> Krishna
> --
To my best (fading) recollection, this was a recognition of existing
common practice in the FP implementations we looked at. The thought was
that illegal characters could invalidate the conversion, but nothing else.
Cheers,
Elizabeth
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