Negative NaN is not a NaN?

Question

While writing some test cases, and some of the tests check for the result of a NaN.

I tried using std::isnan but the assert failes:

Assertion `std::isnan(x)' failed. 

After printing the value of x, it turned out it's negative NaN (-nan) which is totally acceptable in my case.

After trying to use the fact that NaN != NaN and using assert(x == x), the compiler does me a 'favor' and optimises the assert away.

Making my own isNaN function is being optimised away as well.

How can I check for both equality of NaN and -NaN?

Answer 1

This is embarrassing.

The reason the compiler (GCC in this case) was optimising away the comparison and isnan returned false was because someone in my team had turned on -ffast-math.

From the docs:

 -ffast-math     Sets -fno-math-errno, -funsafe-math-optimizations,     -fno-trapping-math, -ffinite-math-only, -fno-rounding-math, -fno-signaling-nans and fcx-limited-range.      This option causes the preprocessor macro __FAST_MATH__ to be defined.      This option should never be turned on by any -O option since it can result in incorrect output for programs which depend on an exact implementation of IEEE or ISO rules/specifications for math functions.  

Notice the ending sentence - -ffast-math is unsafe.