Start of IEEE 754 support

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Following the discussions with @ridgeworks and Joachim Schimpf from ECLiPSe, I’ve pushed a couple of commits that provide the first steps towards IEEE-754 support following this proposal

  • (Already since 2014) Support NaN, Inf, -0.0 and copysign/2
  • Added nexttoward/2
  • Have 4 flags, one for each float event (underflow, overflow, zero-div, undefined) that allow generating one of the IEEE float special values or throw an exception. By default, as before, all but underflow generate exceptions.
  • Have control over float rounding using the flag float_rounding.

Not all is set in stone. One thing to be done is verify all the special value generation and subsequent handling in functions is correct. I’ll wait for a test suite :slight_smile:

Another issues is float rounding. As is, you can set this to to_negative, compute, to to_positive, compute again and (optionally) back to nearest to get an interval. Unfortunately it is hard to guarantee the flag remains unchanged at the end of the process. The ECLiPSe solution is to have a type breal (bounded real). It feels as a bit of an overkill to add another atomic type to deal with this. ECLiPSe is primarily a constraint system where this often makes sense, SWI-Prolog is not. Ideas welcome. One might be an alternative to is/2 that computes the bounds as a compound term? If we define the same compound as a function that, depending on the rounding mode returns the upper or lower bound we have something similar to what we used to have for rdiv that allows getting the job done fairly easily with little impact (but a little less elegantly).

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