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On Feb 27, 2005, at 01:36, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:

1) Add 'math.nan' as a constant to the math library. At the moment, the
"feature" of doing
       local nan = tonumber("nan")
works, but is inconvenient, probably non portable and hard to remember.

A more portable solution is something like "nan = math.sqrt(-1)", but
that relies on IEEE 754. Perhaps an IEEE 754 library would be a good
idea (I have a draft of one but it's not complete and it's not portable,
not even among platforms that claim to be IEEE 754. C99 helps here but
it's not widespread yet.)

nan = tonumber"nan" will do, it's not very non-portable. On an IEEE conforming system this will generate a NaN. On systems without NaNs then it will generate 0. Seems like a reasonable behaviour. You can even do [[ if nan == nan ]] to see which one you ended up with.

Why would anyone anyone want math.nan anyhow? Surely they get generated naturally as the result of ordinary computation.

David Jones