[Cfp-interest 2309] History of HUGE_VAL

[Damian McGuckin]

My memory, which could be wrong, reminds me that in Unix Sys5 Rel3, which
was released in 1987,

 	HUGE_VAL

was a macro definition for the largest positve floating point number. This 
corresponds to the naming used in languages like Fortran and PL/1 where 
the term HUGE has that same meaning.

This UNIX release was in distillation during the release of the very first 
IEEE 754 Floating Point Standard.

Obviously 1987 predates any C standard, although the X3J11 committee that
was established to create that standard was formed in 1983.

At what time/date did HUGE_VAL within the C floating point model become
aliased to an INFINITY, rather than be part of the HUGE/TINY pairing?
Was it from the start, i.e. 1988/1989?

Stay safe - Damian

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