Is there a standard way to check for Infinite and NaN in Fortran 90/95?

Question

I've been trying to find a standards-compliant way to check for Infinite and NaN values in Fortran 90/95 but it proved harder than I thought.

• I tried to manually create Inf and NaN variables using the binary representation described in IEEE 754, but I found no such functionality.
• I am aware of the intrinsic ieee_arithmetic module in Fortran 2003 with the ieee_is_nan() and ieee_is_finite() intrinsic functions. However it's not supported by all the compilers (notably gfortran as of version 4.9).

Defining infinity and NaN at the beginning like pinf = 1. / 0 and nan = 0. / 0 seems hackish to me and IMHO can raise some building problems - for example if some compilers check this in compile time one would have to provide a special flag.

Is there a way I can implement in standard Fortran 90/95?

function isinf(x)
! Returns .true. if x is infinity, .false. otherwise
...
end function isinf

and isnan()?

Answer 1

The simple way without using the ieee_arithmatic is to do the following.

Infinity: Define your variable infinity = HUGE(dbl_prec_var) (or, if you have it, a quad precision variable). Then you can simply check to see if your variable is infinity by if(my_var > infinity).

NAN: This is even easier. By definition, NAN is not equal to anything, even itself. Simply compare the variable to itself: if(my_var /= my_var).