Checking if a double (or float) is NaN in C++

Question

Is there an isnan() function?

PS.: I\'m in MinGW (if that makes a difference).

I had this solved by using isnan() from , which doe

Answer 1

There is no isnan() function available in current C++ Standard Library. It was introduced in C99 and defined as a macro not a function. Elements of standard library defined by C99 are not part of current C++ standard ISO/IEC 14882:1998 neither its update ISO/IEC 14882:2003.

In 2005 Technical Report 1 was proposed. The TR1 brings compatibility with C99 to C++. In spite of the fact it has never been officially adopted to become C++ standard, many (GCC 4.0+ or Visual C++ 9.0+ C++ implementations do provide TR1 features, all of them or only some (Visual C++ 9.0 does not provide C99 math functions).

If TR1 is available, then cmath includes C99 elements like isnan(), isfinite(), etc. but they are defined as functions, not macros, usually in std::tr1:: namespace, though many implementations (i.e. GCC 4+ on Linux or in XCode on Mac OS X 10.5+) inject them directly to std::, so std::isnan is well defined.

Moreover, some implementations of C++ still make C99 isnan() macro available for C++ (included through cmath or math.h), what may cause more confusions and developers may assume it's a standard behaviour.

A note about Viusal C++, as mentioned above, it does not provide std::isnan neither std::tr1::isnan, but it provides an extension function defined as _isnan() which has been available since Visual C++ 6.0

On XCode, there is even more fun. As mentioned, GCC 4+ defines std::isnan. For older versions of compiler and library form XCode, it seems (here is relevant discussion), haven't had chance to check myself) two functions are defined, __inline_isnand() on Intel and __isnand() on Power PC.