1^NaN and 1^Inf

[John W. Eaton]

In the last day or so, there has been a thread on the Matlab newsgroup
about the values that Matlab returns for 1^NaN and 1^Inf.  In both
cases, Matlab returns NaN, but Octave returns whatever the C library
function pow (double x, double y) returns.  The GNU C library returns
1 for both cases.  On other systems, we may get other results.

An argument for the NaN results can be found in the paper "What Every
Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by
David Goldberg, on page 218 at the end of the section "Ambiguity".
PDF copies of this paper are available on the web, for example, I
found one at

  http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/files/Processors/WECSSKAFloatingPoint.pdf

but a quick search will turn up many more copies.

I submitted a bug report, but the maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper,
says that the current behavior is what the ISO C standard requires.

What do people think Octave should do for these expressions?

Thanks,

jwe