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Example of changes to math function page (log.3)

DISCUSSION Michael Kerrisk 1 participant 1 message Jul 13, 2008 Man-pages: manual pages for Linux -- Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7

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Andries, (and Fabian, et al.)

Just by way of background, below are the kinds of changes I plan to make to the math pages to address:

a) The poor discussion of return values for various special cases (Nan, +/-Inf).

b) The need to tell the programmer how to detect errrors (addressed by referring them to math-error.7).

The example here is the changed text for log.3.

Does this seem like a reasonable approach?

Cheers,

Michael

+.SH RETURN VALUE
+On success, these functions return the natural logarithm of +.IR x .
+
+If
+.I x
+is a NaN, then a NaN is returned.
+
+If
+.I x
+is the representation of positive infinity, then
+.I x
+is returned.
+
+If
+.I x
+is zero, a "pole error" occurs, and the functions +return
+.RB - HUGEVAL ,
+.RB - HUGEVALF ,
+or
+.RB - HUGEVALL ,
+respectively.
+
+If
+.I x
+is negative
+(including the representation of negative infinity)
+a "domain error" occurs, and a NaN (not a number) is returned.
.SH ERRORS
+See
+.BR math_error (7)
+for information on how to determine whether an error has occurred +when calling these functions.
+.PP
+.I errno
+may be set to the following values:

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