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I knew double or float value can be not only normal value(-1.3, 0, 1.0, 2.3) but also NAN and INFINITY in Objective-C.

Is there other special values except for NAN and INFINITY for double/float value in Objective-C?

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There are no other "special" values that exists. Besides this easily could be answered by looking at the specification for double/float within the current Objective-C documentation. – Ramhound Jul 13 '12 at 14:32
@Ramhound of course, I sometimes tried searching in XCode Organizer's Documentation and google. But I couldn't find. Could you tell me the link to the document if you know it? – js_ Jul 13 '12 at 14:38

1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Primitive types in Objective-C are covered by the C standard, since ObjC is an OOP system grafted to C.

Which transforms your question to "What special values are there for float/doubles in C?"

Most (if not all) compilers will generate float and double arithmetic that conforms to IEEE 754. In this standard, there are 2 types of NaNs (signalling and quiet), 2 infinities (+Infinity, -Infinity) and finite numbers (which include signed zeros, +0 and -0). The topic is too wide to even start, and you'd do yourself a favor by reading a book about floating point arithmetic.

However the C language standard (before C99) does not make any guarantees for conformance to IEEE 754 and this is only a de-facto standard.

Also, in C you check for NaN values with the isnan function.

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@KSteff thanks for detailed answer. it was helpful. – js_ Jul 20 '12 at 15:04
2  
Actually NANs can have a payload. Therefore there are two kinds of NANs (signaling and quiet) but each kind has multiple values. Not all implementations, however, have reasonable support for defining/accessing the payload or any guaranteed support for it. – Analog File Sep 18 '12 at 13:48
@AnalogFile Indeed, it seems I missed to point that out. The main point I wanted to make was the topic is too wide to be answered here in a reasonable way. – K.Steff Sep 18 '12 at 16:42

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