floats default to NaN... why?

[Kevin]

On Sat 09 Jun 2012 14:59:21 EDT, Jerome BENOIT wrote:
>
>
> On 09/06/12 20:48, Kevin wrote:
>> On 09/06/12 14:42, Minas wrote:
>>>> With
>>>> ints, the best we can do is 0. With floats, NaN makes it better.
>>>
>>> With the logic that NaN is the default for floats, 0 is a very bad
>>> choice for ints. It the worst we could do. Altough I understand that
>>> setting it to something else like -infinity is still not a good choice.
>> Is it just me but do ints not have infinity values?
>
> in Mathematics yes, but not in D.
>
>  I think ints should
>> default to about half of their capacity (probably negative for signed).
>
> This would be machine depends, as such it should be avoided.
>
>> This way you are unlikely to get an off-by-one for an uninitialized
>> values.
>
> something as a Not an Integer NaI should be better.

I just don't think it is a good idea to add more metadata to ints.