The IEEE floatingΓÇôpoint standard provides representations to indicate when floatingΓÇôpoint overflow has taken place, and to indicate when an operation cannot produce a numeric result. These representations are called "infinities" and "nans". ("Nan" stands for "not a number".) Pixie Scheme handles these representations so as to facilitate calculations: Procedures that both accept and return numeric values generally accept infinities and nans without balking, and return whatever value is appropriate. However, procedures which perform an explicit or implicit ordering of numeric values report an error when called with a nan as argument.
