The Old New Thing

What does -1.#IND mean?: A survey of how the Visual C runtime library prints special floating point values

February 21, 2013 Feb 21, 2013 02/21/13

Raymond Chen

As every computer scientist knows, the IEEE floating point format reserves a number of representations for infinity and non-numeric values (collectively known as NaN, short for not a number). If you try to print one of these special values with the Visual C runtime library, you will get a corresponding special result: Positive and ...