Floating-Point Constant with Payload

[Jon Sargeant]

Hi,

I'm looking for a general purpose way of initializing a floating-point
constant with an arbitrary bit pattern using C99. For example,

const unsigned int x=0x3f800000U; //assume 32-bits
const float y=*(float*)&x; //assume 32-bit single-precision IEEE754

Compiling this code on GCC generates the error "initializer element is
not constant". I can enter plus/minus zero, finites, infinites (using
1.0/0.0 and -1.0/0.0), but NaNs have me stumped. How do I get a
constant NaN with a specific payload? nan() looked promising until I
realized that it returns a variable. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jon

[Barry Schwarz]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:49:01 -0700, Jon Sargeant <de*****@cox.net>
wrote:

>Hi,

I'm looking for a general purpose way of initializing a floating-point
constant with an arbitrary bit pattern using C99. For example,

const unsigned int x=0x3f800000U; //assume 32-bits
const float y=*(float*)&x; //assume 32-bit single-precision IEEE754

Compiling this code on GCC generates the error "initializer element is
not constant". I can enter plus/minus zero, finites, infinites (using
1.0/0.0 and -1.0/0.0), but NaNs have me stumped. How do I get a
constant NaN with a specific payload? nan() looked promising until I
realized that it returns a variable. Any ideas?

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