Horton

Re: min() and NaN

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>

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From: Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone.bigpanda.com>, Jean-Luc Lachance <jllachan@nsd.ca>, "Michael S. Tibbetts" <mtibbetts@head-cfa.cfa.harvard.edu>, pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-07-24T18:35:46Z
Lists: pgsql-sql 
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:

> NULL can be special, because it acts specially in comparisons anyway.
> But NaN is just a value of the datatype.

Does postgres intend to support all the different types of NaN? Does you
intend to have +Inf and -Inf and underflow detection and all the other goodies
you actually need to make it useful?

If not it seems more useful to just use the handy unknown-value thing SQL
already has and turn NaN into a NULL. 

-- 
greg