NaN-boxing is a way to store various information in unused NaN-space in the IEEE754 representation. Any value with the top 13 bits set represents a quiet NaN. The remaining bits …

Jan 31, 2013 · Using NaN for "exceptional values" is a well known and sometimes helpful technique to avoid the need of an extra boolean variable this_value_is_invalid. Used wisely, it …

Nov 26, 2016 · How do dynamically typed languages hold any data type in any value? One way is [NaN-Boxing](/a/nan-boxing). This technique crams a payload into a signaling NaN value.

Jan 5, 2024 · NaN-boxing allows keeping numbers as floating points while embedding pointers for non-numbers inside the NaN payload, saving up on allocation costs, cache misses, etc... What …

Jun 1, 2017 · You can remove the NaNs from the data first, then plot the filtered data. To do that, you can first find the NaN s using np.isnan(data) , then perform the bitwise inversion of that …

Sep 8, 2020 · This is where NaN boxing comes in. NaN boxing allows you to cram extra information into the NaN value that exists within the floating-point spectrum of numbers. Let’s …

Tagged unions are OK, but NaN boxes are twice as nice. The main concept is to exploit the fact that IEEE-754 NaN values can have a payload, but the hardware generates a fixed and well …

Nan-box IEEE 754 encodes 32-bit floating points with 1 bit for the sign, 8 bits for the exponent, and 23 bits for the number part (mantissa). For the specific case of NaN (e.g. the result of …

Summary of NaN-Boxing More explicitly, there are 2 types of NaN values (the sign bit is arbitrary for NaN in both cases): Quiet NaN: the exponent bits are all 1, the bit after the exponent is …

Type-safe NaN boxing in Rust. Many interpreters for languages that include lots of floating point numbers use a technique known as NaN-boxing for improved space efficiency. What is it, and …