Allocate / assign NAN to a variable

ROOT
1

Hello,

I was wondering , how to allocate / assign NAN (not a number) to a variable.*

for example:

                         Double_t number = NAN;

or something… I tried “NAN”, “NaN” and “nan” but it did not work.

*I heard this is usefull, if you have a couple of numbers, for example stored in an array, and you want root to make a histogramm out of it --> then root ignores all entries where “NAN” is stored.

Thanks in advance!

With kind regards,

Richard

2

If you compile your code you use the standard C++ way of getting a nan, e.g. for a double variable

#include <limits>

// ...

const double NAN = std::numeric_limits<double>::quiet_NaN();

This unfortunately doesn’t seem to work in CINT (neither does a possible way in C via nan() from math.h).

If you really need to have this work in interpreted code (i.e. not compiled), you can as a temporary workaround use results of undefined operations. Since with any of these your code becomes undefined as far as ROOT and C++ are concerned you should at least use a variable/define, so you can migrate any resulting breakage more easily. Using compiled code saves you from all this since in C++ there are ways to access a possible NaN value.

const double NAN = sqrt(-1);

If you can find something on that in the ROOT documentation, then go ahead and use it. Otherwise I would expect this to break anytime things in that part of the code get shuffled around.